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A HISTORY OF ENGLISH 
ROMANTICISM IN THE 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



A HISTORY OF ENGLISH 
ROMANTICISM IN THE 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



BY 

HENRY A. BEERS 

Author of ^'' A Suburban Pastorai^^' '' TheWays 0/ Vu.'e.'^tc. 



" Was unsterblich im Gesang soil leben 
Muss im Leben untergehen."— Schiller 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1899 



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2(K>;U) 



Copyright, 

BY 



HENRY HOLT & CO. 

: J COPIES r^^ECEiVci:^ 



,:i 'JF €Q, 



,y V 



,,'''OVTiCfc. 



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M^> 







E MERSHON COMPANY Hit 
AHWAY, N. J. 



2^7 



PREFACE. 



Historians of French and German literature are 
accustomed to set off a period, or a division of their 
subject, and entitle it ** Romanticism " or *'the 
Romantic School," Writers of English literary 
history, while recognizing the importance of Eng- 
land's share in this great movement in European 
letters, have not generally accorded it a place by itself 
in the arrangement of their subject-matter, but have 
treated it cursively, as a tendency present in the work 
off individual authors; and have maintained a simple 
chronological division of eras into the ** Georgian," 
the ** Victorian," etc. The reason of this is perhaps 
to be found in the fact that, although Romanticism be- 
gan earlier in England than on the Continent and lent 
quite as much as it borrowed in the international 
exchange of literary commodities^ the native move- 
ment was more gradual and scattered. It never 
reached so compact a shape, or came so definitely to 
a head, as in Germany and France. There never was 
precisely a ** romantic school" or an all-pervading 
romantic fashion in England. 

There is, therefore, nothing in English correspond- 
ing to Heine's fascinating sketch **Die Romantische 
Schule," or to Theophile Gautier's almost equally 
fascinating and far more sympathetic **Histoire du 



iv T^reface. 

Romantismc." If we can imagine a composite person- 
ality of Byron and De Quincey, putting on record his 
half affectionate and half satirical reminiscences of 
the contemporary literary movement, we might have 
something nearly equivalent. For Byron, like Heine, 
was a repentant romanticist, with '' radical notions 
under his cap," and a critical theory at odds with his 
practice; while De Quincey was an early disciple of 
Wordsworth and Coleridge, — as Gautier was of Victor 
Hugo, — and at the same time a clever and slightly mis- 
chievous sketcher of personal traits. 

The present volume consists, in substance, of a 
series of lectures given in elective courses in Yale 
College. In revising it for publication I have striven 
to rid it of the air of the lecture room, but a few 
repetitions and didacticisms of manner may have in- 
advertently been left in. Some of the methods and 
results of these studies have already been given to 
the public in "The Beginnings of the English 
Romantic Movement," by my present associate and 
former scholar, Professor William Lyon Phelps. 
Professor Phelps' little book (originally a doctorate 
thesis) follows, in the main, the selection and arrange- 
ment of topics in my lectures. En revanche I have 
had the advantage of availing myself of his inde- 
pendent researches on points which 1 have touched 
but slightly; and particularly of his very full treat- 
ment of the Spenserian imitations. 

I hadat first intended to entitle the book ** Chapters 
toward a History of English Romanticism, etc."; for, 
though fairly complete in treatment, it makes no claim 
to being exhaustive. By no means every eighteenth- 
century writer whose work exhibits romantic motives 



'Preface. v 

is here passed in review. That very singular genius 
William Blake, e. g., in whom the influence of " Ossian," 
among other things, is so strongly apparent, I leave 
untouched; because his writings — partly by reason of 
their strange manner of publication — were without 
effect upon their generation and do not form a link in 
the chain of literary tendency. 

If this volume should be favorably received, I hope 
before very long to publish a companion study of 
English romanticism in the nineteenth century. 

H. A. B. 

October, i8g8. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Subject Defined, i 

II, The Augustans, 24 

III. The Spenserians, 62 

IV. The Landscape Poets, 102 

V. The Miltonic Group, 146 

VI. The School of Warton 186 

VII. The Gothic Revival 221 

VIII. Percy and the Ballads, 265 

IX. Ossian, 306 

X. Thomas Chatterton, 339 

XI. The German Tributary, 374 



A HISTORY OF ENGLISH 
ROMANTICISM. 



CHAPTER I. 
^be Subject 2)ef[ncD. 

To attempt at the outset a rigid definition of the 
word romanticism would be to anticipate the substance 
of this volume. To furnish an answer to the question — 
What is, or was, romanticism? or, at least, What is, or 
was, English romanticism? — is one of my main pur- 
poses herein, and the reader will be invited to examine 
a good many literary documents, and to do a certain 
amount of thinking, before he can form for himself 
any full and clear notion of the thing. Even then he 
will hardly find himself prepared to give a dictionary 
definition of romanticism. There are words which 
connote so much, which take up into themselves so 
much of the history of the human mind, that any com- 
pendious explanation of their meaning — any definition 
which is not, at the same time, a rather extended 
description — must serve little other end than to sup- 
ply a convenient mark of identification. How can we 
define in a sentence words like renaissance, philistine, 
sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia, preraphael- 
ite, impressionist, realistic? Definitio est negatio. It 



\ 



2 eA History of English %omanticism. 

may be possible to hit upon a form of words which will 
mark romanticism off from everything else — tell in a 
clause what it is /io^; but to add a positive content to 
the definition — to tell what romanticism /V, will require 
a very different and more gradual process.* 

Nevertheless a rough, working definition may be use- 
ful to start with. Romanticism, then, in the sense in 
which I shall commonly employ the word, means the 
reproduction in modern art or literature of the life 
and thought of the Middle Ages. Some other elements 
will have to be added to this definition, and some 
modifications of it will suggest themselves from time 
to time. It is provisional, tentative, elastic, but will 
serve our turn till we are ready to substitute a better. 
It is the definition which Heine gives in his brilliant 
little book on the Romantic School in Germany, f 
** All the poetry of the Middle Ages," he adds, *' has 
a certain definite character, through which it differs 
from the poetry of the Greeks and Romans. In refer- 
ence to this difference, the former is called Romantic, 
the latter Classic. These names, however, are mis- 

* Les definitions ne se posent pas a priori, si ce n'est peutetre en 
mathematiques. En histoire, c'est de I'etude patiente de la realite 
qu'elles se degagent insensiblement. Si M. Deschanel ne nous a pas 
donne du romantisme la definition que nous reclamions tout ^ 
I'heure, c'est, d vrai dire, que son enseignement a pour objet de 
preparer cette definition meme. Nous la trouverons oil elle doit etre, 
a la fin du cours et non pas i debut. — F. Brunetikre: *' Classiques et 
Romantiques, Etudes Critiques" Tome III. p. 296. 

f Was war aber die romantische Schule in Deutschland? Sie war 
nichts anders als die Wiedererweckung der Poesie des Mittelalters, 
wie sie sich in dessen Liedern, Bild- und Bauwerken, in Kunst und 
Leben, manifestiert hatte.— ZPiV romantische Schule {Cotta edition)^ 
p. 158. 



The Subject ^Defined. 3 

leading, and have hitherto caused the most vexatious 
confusion." * 

Some of the sources of this confusion will be con- 
sidered presently. Meanwhile the passage recalls the 
fact that romantic^ when used as a term in literary 
nomenclature, is not an independent, but a referential 
word. It implies its opposite, the classic; and the 
ingenuity of critics has been taxed to its uttermost 
to explain and develop the numerous points of con- 
trast. To forma thorough conception of the romantic, 
therefore, we must also form some conception of the 
classic. Now there is an obvious unlikeness between 
the thought and art of the nations of pagan antiquity 
and the thought and art of the peoples of Christian, 
feudal Europe. Everyone will agree to call the 
Parthenon, the ** Diana "of the Louvre, the "CEdipus" 
of Sophocles, the orations of Demosthenes classical; 
and to call the cathedral of Chartres, the walls of 
Nuremberg — die Perle des Miitelalters — the ''Legenda 
Aurea " of Jacobus de Voragine, the *' Tristan und 
Isolde " of Gottfried of Strasburg, and the illuminations 
in a Catholic missal of the thirteenth century romantic. 

The same unlikeness is found between modern 
works conceived in the spirit, or executed in direct 
imitation, of ancient and mediaeval art respectively. 
It is easy to decide that Flaxman's outline drawings 
in illustration of Homer are classic; that Alfieri's 
tragedies, Goethe's '* Iphigenie auf Tauris " Landor's 
** Hellenics," Gibson's statues, David's paintings, and 
the church of the Madeleine in Paris are classical, at 
least in intention and in the models which they follow; 
while Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," Scott's 

* " The Romantic School " (Fleishman's translation), p. 13. 



4 e/^ History of English %omanticism. 

** Ivanhoe," Fouqu^'s "DerZauberring," and Rossetti's 
painting, *'The Girlhood of Mary," are no less cer- 
tainly romantic in their inspiration. 

But critics have given a wider extension than this 
to the terms classic and romantic. They have dis- 
cerned, or imagined, certain qualities, attitudes of 
mind, ways of thinking and feeling, traits of style 
which distinguish classic from romantic art; and they 
have applied the words accordingly to work which is 
not necessarily either antique or mediaeval in subject. 
Thus it is assumed, for example, that the productions 
of Greek and Roman genius were characterized by 
clearness, simplicity, restraint, unity of design, sub- 
ordination of the part to the whole; and therefore 
modern works which make this impression of noble 
plainness and severity, of harmony in construction, , 
economy of means and clear, definite outline, are 
often spoken of as classical, quite irrespective of the 
historical period which they have to do with. In this 
sense, it is usual to say that Wordsworth's ** Michael " 
is classical, or that Goethe's ** Hermann und Doro- 
thea" is classical; though Wordsworth may be cele- 
brating the virtues of a Westmoreland shepherd, and 
Goethe telling the story of two rustic lovers on 
the German border at the time of the Napoleonic 
wars. 

On the other hand, it is asserted that the work of 
mediaeval poets and artists is marked by an excess of 
sentiment, by over-lavish decoration, a strong sense 
of color and a feeble sense of form, an attention to 
detail, at the cost of the main impression, and a con- 
sequent tendency to run into the exaggerated, the 
fantastic, and the grotesque. It is not uncommon, 



The Subject T>efined. 5 

therefore, to find poets like Byron and Shelley classi- 
fied as romanticists, by virtue of their possession of 
these, or similar, characteristics, although no one 
could be more remote from mediaeval habits of thought 
than the author of ''Don Juan" or the author of 
**The Fevolt of Islam." 

But the extension of these opposing terms to the 
work of writers who have so little in common with 
either the antique or the mediaeval as Wordsworth, on 
the one hand, and Byron, on the other, does not stop 
here. It is one of the embarrassments of the literary 
historian that nearly every word which he uses has 
two meanings, a critical and a popular meaning. In 
common speech, classic has come to signify almost 
anything that is good. If we look in our dictionaries 
we find it defined somewhat in this way: " Conform- 
ing to the best authority in literature and art; pure; 
chaste; refined; originally and chiefly used of the best 
Greek and Roman writers, but also applied to the 
best modern authors, or their works." ** Classic, //. 
A work of acknowledged excellence and authority." 
In this sense of the word, ** Robinson Crusoe" is a 
classic; the ''Pilgrim's Progress" is a classic; every 
piece of literature which is customarily recommended 
as a safe pattern for young writers to form their style 
upon is a classic* 

Contrariwise the word romantic^ as popularly emr 
ployed, expresses a shade of disapprobation. The 

* Un classique est tout artiste k I'ecole de qui nous pouvous nous 
mettre sans craindre que ses legons ou ses exemples nous fourvoient. 
Ou encore, c'est celui qui poss6de . . . des qualitesdont I'imitation, 
si elle ne peut pas faire de bien, ne peut pas non plus faire de mal. 
— F. Brunetih-e, ** Etudes Critiques," Tome III. p. 300. 



/ 



6 cA History of English Romanticism, 

dictionaries make it a synonym for sentimental^ /and- 
fulj wildj extravagant^ chimerical^ all evident derivatives 
from their more critical definition, ** pertaining or 
appropriate to the style of the Christian and popular 
literature of the Middle Ages, as opposed to the clas- 
sical antique." The etymology of romance is familiar. 
The various dialects which sprang from the corrup- 
tion of the Latin were called by the common name of 
ro?nans. The name was then applied to any piece of 
literature composed in this vernacular instead of in the 
ancient classical Latin. And as the favorite kind of 
writing in Provenfal, Old French, and Spanish was the 
tale of chivalrous adventure, that was called par excel- 
lence^ a roman, romans, or rojna?tce. The adjective ro- 
mantic is much later, implying, as it does, a certain 
degree of critical attention to the species of fiction 
which it describes in order to a generalizing of its 
peculiarities. It first came into general use in the 
latter half of the seventeenth century ^nd the early 
years of the eighteenth; and naturally, in a period 
which considered itself classical, was marked from 
birth with that shade of disapproval which has been 
noticed in popular usage. 

The feature that struck the critics most in the 
romances of the Middle Ages, and in that very different 
variety of romance which was cultivated during the sev- 
enteenth century — the prolix, sentimental fictions of 
La Calprenede, Scuderi, Gomberville, and d'Urfe — was 
the fantastic improbability of their adventures. Hence 
the common acceptation of the word roma?itic in such 
phrases as *'a romantic notion," **a romantic elope- 
^ ment," "an act of romantic generosity." The appli- 
' cation of the adjective to scenery was somewhat 



The Subject Tie fined, 7 

later;* and the abstract romanticisin was, of course, 
very much later; as the literary movement, or the 
revolution in taste, which it entitles, was not enough 
developed to call for a name until the opening of the 
nineteenth century. Indeed it was never so compact, 
conscious, and definite a movement in England as in 
Germany and France; and its baptism doubtless came 
from abroad, from the polemical literature which 
attended the career of the German romanticismus and 
the French romantisme. 

While accepting provisionally Heine's definition, it 
will be useful to examine some of the wider meanings 
that have been attached to the words classic and 
romantic^ and some of the analyses that have been 
attempted of the qualities that make one work of art 
classical and another romantic. Walter Pater took 
them to indicate opposite tendencies or elements which 
are present in varying proportions in all good art. It 
is the essential function of classical art and literature, 
he thought, to take care of the qualities of measure, 
purity, temperance. **What is classical comes to us 
out of the cool and quiet of other times, as a measure 
of what a long experience has shown us will, at least, 
never displease us. And in the classical literature of 
Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the last cen- 
tury, the essentially classical element is that quality of 
order in beauty which they possess, indeed, in a pre- 
eminent degree." f *' The charm, then, of what is 

* Mr. Perry thinks that one of the first instances of the use of the 
word romantic is by the diarist Evelyn in 1654 : " There is also, on 
the side of this horrid alp, a very romantic seat." — English Literature 
in the Eighteenth Century^ by Thomas Sergeant Perry ^ p. 148, note. 

\ " Romanticism,'* Macmillan's Magazine, Vol. XXXV. 



8 c// History of English Romanticism. 

classical in art or literature is that of the well-known 
tale, to which we can nevertheless listen over and 
over again, because it is told so well. To the 
absolute beauty of its form is added the accidental, 
tranquil charm of familiarity." 

On the other hand, he defines the romantic charac- 
ter in art as consisting in '* the addition of strangeness 
to beauty" — a definition which recalls Bacon's saying, 
*' There is no excellent beauty that hath not some 
strangeness in the proportion." **The desire of 
beauty," continues Pater, ''being a fixed element in 
every artistic organization, it is the addition of curi- 
osity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the 
romantic temper." This critic, then, would not con- 
fine the terms classic and classicism to the literature of 
Greece and Rome and to modern works conceived in 
the same spirit, although he acknowledges that there 
are certain ages of the world in which the classical tra- 
dition predominates, /. <f., in which the respect for 
authority, the love of order and decorun:^, the disposi- 
tion to follow rules and models, the acceptance of 
academic and conventional standards overbalance the 
desire for strangeness and novelty. Sucfi epochs are, 
e. g.^ the Augustan age of Rome, the Sihle de Louis 
XIV. in France, the times of Pope and Johnson in 
England — indeed, the whole of the eighteenth century 
in all parts of Europe. 

Neither would he limit the word romantic to work 
conceived in the spirit of the Middle Ages. **The 
essential elements," he says, "of the romantic spirit 
are curiosity and the love of beauty; and it is as the 
accidental effect of these qualities only, that it seeks 
the Middle Age; because in the overcharged atmos- 



7he Subject 'Defined. 9 

phere of the Middle Age there are unworked sources of 
romantic effect, of a strange beauty to be won by 
strong imagination out of things unlikely or remote." 
**The sense in which Scott is to be called a romantic 
writer is chiefly that, in opposition to the literary tra- 
dition of the last century, he loved strange adventure 
and sought it in the Middle Age." 

Here again the essayist is careful to explain that 
there are certain epochs which are predominantly 
romantic. ** Outbreaks of this spirit come naturally 
with particular periods: times when . . . men come 
to art and poetry with a deep thirst for intellectual 
"xcitement, after a long ennui.'' He instances, as 
)eriods naturally romantic, the time of the early Pro- 
-en^al troubadour poetry: the years following the 
L>ourbon Restoration in France (say 1815-30); and 
■Hhe later Middle Age; so that the mediaeval 
,)oetry, centering in Dante, is often opposed to 
Crreek or Roman poetry, as romantic to classical 
poetry." 

In Pater's use of the terms, then, classic and ro- 
mantic do not describe particular literatures, or par- 
ticular periods in literary history, so much as certain 
counterbalancing qualities and tendencies which run 
through the literatures of all times and countries. 
There were romantic writings among the Greeks and 
Romans; there were classical writings in the Middle 
Ages; nay, there are classical and romantic traits in 
the same author. If there is any poet who may safely 
be described as a classic, it is Sophocles; and yet Pater 
declares that the " Philoctetes " of Sophocles, if 
issued to-day, would be called romantic. And he points 
out — what indeed has been often pointed out — that the 



lo cA History of English Romanticism, 

'* Odyssey "* is more romantic than the '* Iliad:" is, in 
fact, rather a romance than a hero-epic. The adven- 
tures of the wandering Ulysses, the visit to the land 
of the lotus-eaters, the encounter with the Laestry- 
gonians, the experiences in the cave of Polyphemus, if 
allowance be made for the difference in sentiments and 
manners, remind the reader constantly of the mediaeval 
romans d'aventure. Pater quotes De Stendhal's say- 
ing that all good art was romantic in its day. 
" Romanticism," says De Stendhal, **is the art of pre- 
senting to the nations the literary works which, in the 
actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of 
giving them the greatest possible pleasure: classicism, 
on the contrary, presents them with what gave the 
greatest possible pleasure to their great grand- 
fathers " — a definition which is epigrammatic, if not 
convincing.! De Stendhal (Henri Beyle) was a 
pioneer and a special pleader in the cause of French 
romanticism, and, in his use of the terms, romanticism 

* The Odyssey has been explained throughout in an allegorical 
sense. The episode of Circe, at least, lends itself obviously to such 
interpretation, Circe's cup has become a metaphor for sensual 
intoxication, transforming men into beasts; Milton, in "Comus," 
regards himself as Homer's continuator, enforcing a lesson of 
temperance in Puritan times hardly more consciously than the old 
Ionian Greek in times which have no other record than his poem. 

f" Racine et Shakespeare, Etudes en Romantisme" (1823), p. 32, ed. 
of Michel Levy Freres, 1854. Such v^'ould also seem to be the view 
maintained by M. Emile Deschanel, whose book " Le Romantisme des 
Classiques" (Paris, 1883) is reviewed by M. Brunetiere in an article 
already several times quoted. " Tons les classiques," according to M. 
Deschanel — at least, so says his reviewer — " ont jadis commence par 
etre des romantiques." And again : '* Un romantique serait tout 
simplement un classique en route pour parvenir ; et, reciproquement, 
un classique ne serait de plus qu'un romantique arrive." 



[ 



The Subject Tfefined. ii 

stands for progress, liberty, originality, and the spirit 
of the future; classicism, for conservatism, authority, 
imitation, the spirit of the past. According to him, 
every good piece of romantic art is a classic in the 
making. Decried by the classicists of to-day, for its 
failure to observe traditions, it will be used by the 
classicists of the future as a pattern to which new 
artists must conform. 

It may be worth while to round out the concep- 
tion of the term by considering a few other defini- 
tions of romafitic which have been proposed. Dr. 
F. H. Hedge, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly"^ 
for March, 1886, inquired, ^'What do we mean by 
romantic? " Goethe, he says, characterized the differ- 
ence between classic and romantic **as equivalent to 
[that between] healthy and morbid. Schiller proposed 
'naive and sentimental. 'f The greater part [of the 
German critics] regarded it as identical with the differ- 
ence between ancient and modern, which was partly 
true, but explained nothing. None of the definitions 
given could be accepted as quite satisfactory. "J 

Dr. Hedge himself finds the origin of romantic feel- 
ing in wonder and the sense of mystery. **The 
essence of romance," he writes, ** is mystery"; and 
he enforces the point by noting the application of the 
word to scenery. " The woody dell, the leafy glen, 
the forest path which leads, one knows not whither, 
are romantic: the public highway is not." *'The 

* " Classic and Romantic," Vol. LVII. 

f See Schiller's " Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung." 

X Le mot de romantisme, apres cinquante ans et plus de discussions 

passionnees, ne laisse pas d'etre encore aujourd'hui bien vague et bien 

flottant. — Brunetiere, ibid. 



12 cA History of English %omanticism. 

winding secret t)rook ... is romantic, as compared 
with the broad river." ** Moonlight is romantic, as 
contrasted with daylight." Dr. Hedge attributes this 
fondness for the mysterious to 'Uhe influence of the 
Christian religion, which deepened immensely the 
mystery of life, suggesting something beyond and 
behind the world of sense." 

This charm of wonder or mystery is perhaps only 
another name for that " strangeness added to beauty " 
which Pater takes to be the distinguishing feature of 
romantic art. Later in the same article, Dr. Hedge 
asserts that *' the essence of romanticism is aspira- 
tion." Much might be said in defense of this positionr 
It has often been pointed out, e. g., that a Gothic 
cathedral expresses aspiration, and a Greek temple 
satisfied completeness. Indeed if we agree that, in a 
general way, the classic is equivalent to the antique, 
and the romantic to the mediseval, it will be strange if 
we do not discover many differences between the tv/o 
that can hardly be covered by any single phrase. Dr. 
Hedge himself enumerates several qualities of roman- 
tic art which it would be difficult to bring under his 
essential and defining category of wonder or aspira- 
tion. Thus he announces that ''the peculiarity of the 
classic style is reserve, self-suppression of the writer"; 
while ''the romantic is self-reflecting." "Clear, 
unimpassioned, impartial presentation of the sub- 
ject ... is the prominent feature of the classic 
style. The modern writer gives you not so much the 
things themselves as his impression of them." Here 
then is the familiar critical distinction between the 
objective and subjective methods — Schiller's naiv tind 
sentimentalisch — applied as a criterion of classic and 



■wii^ 'Ill r 

05^7 K 

7 P 5' 



12 ^ History of English %omanticism. 

winding secret brook ... is romantic, as compared 
with the broad river." ** Moonlight is romantic, as 
contrasted with daylight." Dr. Hedge attributes this 
fondness for the mysterious to **the influence of the 
Christian religion, which deepened immensely the 
mystery of life, suggesting something beyond and 
behind the world of sense." 

This charm of wonder or mystery is perhaps only 
another name for that ** strangeness added to beauty " 
which Pater takes to be the distinguishing feature of 
romantic art. Later in the same article, Dr. Hedge 
asserts that ** the essence of romanticism is aspira- 
tion." Much might be said in defense of this j^c-^'--- 
It has often been pointed out, e. g., that a 
cathedral expresses aspiration, and a Greek temple 
satisfied completeness. Indeed if we agree that, in a 
general way, the classic is equivalent to the antique, 
and the romantic to the mediaeval, it will be strange if 
we do not discover many differences between the two 
that can hardly be covered by any single phrase. Dr. 
Hedge himself enumerates several qualities of roman- 
tic art which it would be difficult to bring under his 
essential and defining category of wonder or aspira- 
tion. Thus he announces that "the peculiarity of the 
classic style is reserve, self-suppression of the writer"; 
while "the romantic is self-reflecting." "Clear, 
unimpassioned, impartial presentation of the sub- 
ject ... is the prominent feature of the classic 
style. The modern writer gives you not so much the 
things themselves as his impression of them." Here 
then is the familiar critical distinction between the 
objective and subjective methods— Schiller's naiv und 
sentimentalisch—2.^^\\^d. as a criterion of classic and 



rhe Subject "Defined, 

romantic style. This contrast the essayist develops 
at some length, dwelling upon **the cold reserve and 
colorless simplicity of the classic style, where the 
medium is lost in the object"; and '*on the other 
hand, the inwardness, the sentimental intensity, the 
subjective coloring of the romantic style." 

A further distinguishing mark of the romantic 
spirit, mentioned by Dr. Hedge in common with many 
other critics, is the indefiniteness or incompleteness 
of its creations. This is a consequence, of course, of 
its sense of mystery and aspiration. Schopenhauer 
said that music was the characteristic modern art, 
because of its subjective, indefinite character. Pur- 
suing this line of thought. Dr. Hedge affirms that 
" romantic relates to classic somewhat as music relates 
to plastic art. . . It [music] presents no finished 
ideal, but suggests ideals beyond the capacity of can- 
vas or stone. Plastic art acts on the intellect, music 
on the feelings; the one affects us by what it presents, 
the other by what it suggests. This, it seems to me, 
is essentially the difference between classic and ro- 
mantic poetry "; and he names Homer and Milton as 
examples of the former, and Scott and Shelley of the 
latter school. 

Here then we have a third criterion proposed for 
determining the essential differentia of romantic art. 
First it was mystery, then aspiration; now it is the 
appeal to the emotions by the method of suggestion. 
And yet there is, perhaps, no inconsistency on the 
critic's part in this continual shifting of his ground. 
He is apparently presenting different facets of the same 
truth; he means one thing by this mystery, aspiration, 
indefiniteness, incompleteness, emotional suggestive- 



<!// History of English %omanticism. 



ness: that quality or effect which we all feel to b| 
present in romantic and absent from classic work, buj 
which we find it hard to describe by any single termi 
It is open to any analyst of our critical vocabulary t«^ 
draw out the fullest meanings that he can, from 
such pairs of related words as classic and romantiq 
fancy and imagination, wit and humor, reason ana 
understanding, passion and sentiment. T et uc, foi 
instance, develop briefly this proposition that the idea 
of classic art is completeness* and the ideal of roma™ 
tic art indefiniteness, or suggestiveness. 

A. W. Schlegel t had already made use of two of thi< 
arts of design, to illustrate the distinction betwee< 
classic and romantic, just as Dr. Hedge uses plasty 
art and music. I refer to Schlegel's famous sayin| 
that the genius of the antique drama was statuesquq 
and that of the romantic drama picturesque. A Greel 
temple, statue, or poem has no imperfection and offerl 
no further promise, indicates nothing beyond what i 
expresses. It fills the sense, it leaves nothing to th« 
imagination. It stands correct, symmetric, sharp is 
outline, in the clear light of day. There is nothin| 
more to be done to it; there is no concealment about itj 
But in romantic art there is seldom this completenes^ 
The workman lingers, he would fain add anotheU 
touch, his ideal eludes him. Is a Gothic cathedra* 
ever really finished? Is *' Faust " finished? In 
** Hamlet " explained? The modern spirit is mystical 
its architecture, painting, poetry employ shadow tc 

* Ce qui constitue proprement un classique, c'est I'equilibre en lui 
de toutes les facultes qui concourent k la perfection de roeuvre d'art^ 
— Brunetikre, ibid. 

ist und Litteratur." 



The Subject T>efined, 15 

duce their highest effects: shadow and color rather 
n contour. On the Greek heroic stage there were 
ew figures, two or three at most, grouped like 
:uary and thrown out in bold relief at the apex of 
scene: in Greek architecture a few clean, simple 
:s: in Greek poetry clear conceptions easily express- 
: in language and mostly describable in sensuous 



"he modern theater is crowded with figures and 
Drs, and the distance recedes in the middle of 
scene. This love of perspective is repeated in 
hedral aisles,* the love of color in cathedral win- 
vs, and obscurity hovers in the shadows of the 
lit. In our poetry, in our religion these twilight 
ughts prevail. We seek no completeness here. 
at is beyond, what is inexpressible attracts us. 
nee the greater spirituality of romantic literature, 
deeper emotion, its more passionate tenderness. 
: hence likewise its sentimentality, its melancholy 
I, in particular, the morbid fascination which the 
ught of death has had for the Gothic mind. The 
ssic nations concentrated their attention on life and 
It, and spent few thoughts upon darkness and the 
lb. Death was to them neither sacred nor beauti- 
Their decent rites of sepulture" or cremation 
m designed to hide its deformities rather than to 
long its reminders. The presence of the corpse 
) pollution. No Greek could have conceived such 
00k as the **Hydriotaphia" or the *' Anatomy of 
lancholy." 

* Far to the west the long, long vale withdrawn, 
Where twilight loves to linger for a while. 

—Beattie's *' Minstrel." 



> tA History of English 'T{pmanticisin. 

It is observable that Dr. Hedge is at one with Pater 
in desiring some more philosophical statement of tht 
difference between classic and romantic than tb 
common one which makes it simply the differenc 
between the antique and the mediaeval. He says. 
** It must not be supposed that ancient and classic, oj 
one side, and modern and romantic, on the other, ar^ 
inseparably one; so that nothing approaching tl 
romantic shall be found in any Greek or Romai 
author, nor any classic page in the literature a 
modern Europe. . . The literary line of demarca 
tion is not identical with the chronological one. 
And just as Pater says that the Odyssey is mon 
romantic than the Iliad, so Dr. Hedge says that **thi 
story of Cupid and Psyche,* in the ' Golden Ass ' d 
Apuleius, is as much a romance as any composition a 
the seventeenth or eighteenth century." Mediaevail 
ism he regards as merely an accident of romance 
Scott, as most romantic in his tnemes, but Byron, i 
his mood. 

So, too, Mr. Sidney Colvin f denies that " a predile 
tion for classic subjects . . . can make a writer th; 
which we understand by the word classical as disti] 
guished from that which we understand by the woij 
romantic. The distinction lies deeper, and is a dil 



♦The modernness of this "latest bom of the myths" resid 
partly in its spiritual, almost Christian conception of love, partly 
its allegorical theme, the soul's attainment of immortality throuj 
love. The Catholic idea of penance is suggested, too, in Psyche 
' ■ ; labors long." This apologue has been a favorite "* 
platonizing poets, like Spenser and Milton. See " The Fae| 
Queene," book iii. canto vi. stanza 1., and " Comus," lines ioo2-|| 

t " Selections from Walter Savage Landor," Preface, p. vii. 



The Subject T>efined. 17 

nction much less of subject than of treatment. . . 
1 classical writing every idea is called up to the mind 
; nakedly as possible, and at the same time as dis- 
nctly; it is exhibited in white light, and left to pro- 
jce its effect by its own unaided power.* In romantic 
riting, on the other hand, all objects are exhib- 
ed, as it were, through a colored and iridescent 
:mosphere. Roundabout every central idea the ro- 
lantic writer summons up a cloud of accessory and 
ibordinate ideas for the sake of enhancing its effect, 
at the risk of confusing its outlines. The temper, 
jain, of the romantic writer is one of excitement, 
hile the temper of the classical writer is one of self- 
ossession. . . On the one hand there is calm, on the 
ther hand enthusiasm. The virtues of the one style 
re strength of grasp, with clearness and justice of 
resentment; the virtues of the other style are glow of 
pirit, with magic and richness of suggestion." Mr. 
lolvin then goes on to enforce and illustrate this con- 
rast between the •* accurate and firm definition of 
[iings"inclassicalwriters and the** thrilling vagueness 
nd uncertainty," the tremulous, coruscating, vibrating 
r colored light— the '* halo "—with which the roman- 
ic writer invests his theme. **The romantic man- 
,er, . . with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich 
uggestions, may be more attractive than the classic 
nanner, with its composed and measured preciseness 
if statement. . . But on the other hand the roman- 
ic manner lends itself, as the true classical does not, 
inferior work. Second-rate conceptions excitedly 
.nd approximately put into words derive from it an 

* See also Walter Bagehot's essay on " Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque 
^rt." " Literary Studies, Works " (Hartford, 1889), Vol I. p. 200. 



7he Subject T>efined. 17 

tinction much less of subject than of treatment. . . 
In classical writing every idea is called up to the mind 
as nakedly as possible, and at the same time as dis- 
tinctly; it is exhibited in white light, and left to pro- 
duce its effect by its own unaided power.^ In romantic 
writing, on the other hand, all objects are exhib- 
ited, as it were, through a colored and iridescent 
atmosphere. Roundabout every central idea the ro- 
mantic writer summons up a cloud of accessory and 
subordinate ideas for the sake of enhancing its effect, 
if at the risk of confusing its outlines. The temper, 
again, of the romantic writer is one of excitement, 
while the temper of the classical writer is one of self- 
possession. . . On the one hand there is calm, on the 
other hand enthusiasm. The virtues of the one style 
are strength of grasp, with clearness and justice of 
presentment; the virtues of the other style are glow of 
spirit, with magic and richness of suggestion." Mr. 
Colvin then goes on to enforce and illustrate this con- 
trast between the ** accurate and firm definition of 
things" in classical writers and the * * thrilling vagueness 
and uncertainty," the tremulous, coruscating, vibrating 
or colored light — the " halo" — with which the roman- 
tic writer invests his theme. '*The romantic man- 
ner, . . with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich 
suggestions, may be more attractive than the classic 
manner, with its composed and measured preciseness 
of statement. . . But on the other hand the roman- 
tic manner lends itself, as the true classical does not, 
to inferior work. Second-rate conceptions excitedly 
and approximately put into words derive from it an 

* See also Walter Bagehot's essay on " Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque 
Art," " Literary Studies, Works " (Hartford, 1889), Vol I. p. 200. 



1 8 e^ History of English Romanticism. 

illusive attraction which may make them for a time, 
and with all but the coolest judges, pass as first-rate. 
Whereas about true classical writing there can be no 
illusion. It presents to us conceptions calmly realized 
in words that exactly define them, conceptions depend- 
ing for their attraction, not on their halo, but on 
themselves." 

As examples of these contrasting styles, Mr. Col- 
vin puts side by side passages from *'The Ancient 
Mariner " and Keats' **Ode to a Nightingale," with 
passages, treating similar themes, from Landor's 
*' Gebir " and *' Imaginary Conversations." The con- 
trast might be even more clearly established by a study 
of such a piece as Keats' *^ Ode on a Grecian Urn," 
where the romantic form is applied to classical content; 
or by a comparison of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and 
'* The Lotus Eaters," in which Homeric subjects are 
treated respectively in the classic and the romantic 
manner. 

Alfred de Musset, himself in early life a prominent 
figure among the French romanticists, wrote some 
capital satire upon the bafiling and contradictory defi- 
nitions of the word romantisme that were current in 
the third and fourth decades of this century.* Two 
worthy provincials write from the little town of La 
Ferte-sous-Jouarre to the editor of the " Revue des 
Deux Mondes," appealing to him to tell them what 
romanticism means. For two, years Dupuis and his 
friend Cotonet had supposed that the term applied only 
to the theater, and signified the disregard of the unities. 
*' Shakspere, for example, makes people travel from 

* Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet (1836), ' ' CEuvres Completes " (Char- 
pentier edition, 1881), Tome IX. p. 194. 



The Subject IDe fined. 19 

Rome to London, and from Athens to Alexandria in a 
quarter of an hour. His heroes live ten or twenty years 
between two acts. His heroines, angels of virtue dur- 
ing a whole scene, have only to pass into the coulisses^ 
to reappear as wives, adulteresses, widows, and grand- 
mothers. There, we said to ourselves, is the roman- 
tic. Contrariwise, Sophocles makes CEdipus sit on a 
rock, even at the cost of great personal inconvenience, 
from the very beginning of his tragedy. All the char- 
acters come there to find him, one after the other. 
Perhaps he stands up occasionally, though I doubt it; 
unless, it may be, out of respect for Theseus, v/ho, 
during the entire play, obligingly walks on the high- 
way, coming in or going out continually. . . There, 
we said to ourselves, is the classic." 

But about 1828, continues the letter, *'we learned 
that there were romantic poetry and classical poetry, 
romantic novels and classical novels, romantic odes 
and classical odes; nay, a single line, my dear sir, a 
sole and solitary line of verse might be romantic or 
classic, according as the humor took it. When we 
received this intelligence, we could not close our eyes 
all night. Two years of peaceful conviction had van- 
ished like a dream. All our ideas were turned topsy- 
turvy; for if the rules of Aristotle were no longer the 
line of demarcation which separated the literary camps, 
where was one to find himself, and what was he to 
depend upon? How was one to know, in reading a 
book, which school it belonged to? . . Luckily in the 
same year there appeared a famous preface, which we 
devoured straightway.* . . This said very distinctly 

* Preface to Victor Hugo's ** Cromwell," dated October, 1827. The 
play was printed, but not acted, in 1828. 



20 ^ History of English %omanticism. 

that romanticism was nothing else than the alliance of 
the playful and the serious, of the grotesque and the 
terrible, of the jocose and the horrible, or in other 
words, if you prefer, of comedy and tragedy." 

This definition the anxious inquirers accepted for 
the space of a year, until it was borne in upon them 
that Aristophanes — not to speak of other ancients — 
had mixed tragedy and comedy in his dramas. Once 
again the friends were plunged in darkness, and their 
perplexity was deepened when they were taking a 
walk one evening and overheard a remark made by 
the niece of the soiis-prefet. This young lady had 
fallen in love with English ways, as was — somewhat 
strangely — evidenced by her wearing a green veil, 
orange-colored gloves, and silver-rimmed spectacles. 
As she passed the promenaders, she turned to look at 
a water-mill near the ford, where there were bags of 
grain, geese, and an ox in harness, and she exclaimed 
to her governess, '' Voila U7i site romantique.'' 

This mysterious sentence roused the flagging curi- 
osity of MM. Dupuis and Cotonet, and they renewed 
their investigations. A passage in a newspaper led 
them to believe for a time that romanticism was the 
imitation of the Germans, with, perhaps, the addition 
of the English and Spanish. Then they were tempted 
to fancy that it might be merely a matter of literary 
form, possibly this vers brise (run-over lines, enjam- 
bement) that they are making so much noise about. 
*' From 1830 to 1831 we were persuaded that romanti- 
cism was the historic style {genre historique) or, if you 
please, this mania which has lately seized our authors 
for calling the characters of their novels and melo- 
dramas Charlemagne, Francis I., or Henry IV., in- 



7he Subject 'Defined, 2 1 

stead of Amadis, Oronte, or Saint-Albin. . . From 
183 1 to the year following we thought it was \h^ genre 
i7itime, about which there was much talk. But with 
all the pains that we took we never could discover 
what the gefire intime was. The ' intimate ' novels are 
just like the others. They are in two volumes octavo, 
with a great deal of margin. . . They have yellow 
covers and they cost fifteen francs." From 1832 to 
1833 they conjectured that romanticism might be 
a system of philosophy and political economy. From 
1833 to 1834 they believed that it consisted in not 
shaving one's self, and in wearing a waistcoat vv'ith 
wide facings very much starched. 

At last they bethink themselves of a certain lawyer's 
clerk, who had first imported these literary disputes 
into the village, in 1824. To him they expose their 
difficulties and ask for an answer to the question. 
What is romanticism? After a long conversation, 
they receive this final definition. " Romanticism, my 
dear sir! No, of a surety, it is neither the disregard 
of the unities, nor the alliance of the comic and \ 
tragic, nor anything in the world expressible by words. 
In vain you grasp the butterfly's wing; the dust which 
gives it its color is left upon your fingers. Romanti- 
cism is the star that weeps, it is the wind that wails, 
it is the night that shudders, the bird that flies and 
the flower that breathes perfume: it is the sudden 
gush, the ecstasy grown faint, the cistern beneath the 
palms, rosy hope with her thousand loves, the angel 
and the pearl, the white robe of the willows. It is the 
infinite and the starry," etc., etc. 

Then M. Ducoudray, a magistrate of the depart- 
ment, gives his theory of romanticism, which he con- 



\ 



22 iA History of English %omanticism. 

siders to be an effect of the religious and political 
reaction under the restored Bourbon monarchy of 
Louis XVIII. and Charles X. '*The mania for 
ballads, arriving from Germany, met the legitimist 
poetry one fine day at Ladvocat's bookshop; and the 
two of them, pickax in hand, went at nightfall to 
a churchyard, to dig up the Middle Ages." The taste 
for medisevalism, M. Ducoudray adds, has survived 
the revolution of 1830, and romanticism has even 
entered into the service of liberty and progress, where 
it is a manifest anachronism, '' employing the style of 
Ronsard to celebrate railroads, and imitating Dante 
when it chants the praises of Washington and La- 
fayette." Dupuis was tempted to embrace M. Ducou- 
dray's explanation, but Cotonet was not satisfied. He 
shut himself in, for four months, at the end of which 
he announced his discovery that the true and only dif- 
ference between the classic and the romantic is that 
the latter uses a good many adjectives. He illustrates 
his principle by giving passages from " Paul and Vir- 
ginia " and the '* Portuguese Letters," written in the 
romantic style. 

Thus Musset pricks a critical bubble with the point 
of his satire; and yet the bubble declines to vanish. 
There must really be some more substantial difference 
than this between classic and romantic, for the terms 
persist and are found useful. It may be true that the 
romantic temper, being subjective and excited, tends 
to an excess in adjectives; the adjective being that 
part of speech which attributes qualities, and is there- 
fore most freely used by emotional persons. Still it 
would be possible to cut out all the adjectives, not 
strictly necessary, from one of Tieck's Mdrchen with- 



The Subject defined. 23 

out in the slightest degree disturbing its romantic 
character. 

It remains to add that romanticism is a word which 
faces in two directions. It is now opposed to realism, 
as it was once opposed to classicism. As, in one way, 
its freedom and lawlessness, its love of novelty, experi- 
ment, ** strangeness added to beauty," contrast with 
the classical respect for rules, models, formulas, prec- 
edents, conventions; so, in another way, its discon- 
tent with things as they are, its idealism, aspiration, 
mysticism contrast with the realist's conscientious 
adherence to fact. ** Ivanhoe " is one kind of romance; 
** The Marble Faun " is another.* 

* In modern times romanticism, typifying a permanent tendency 
of the human mind, has been placed in opposition to what is called 
realism. . . [But] there is, as it appears to us, but one fundamental 
note which all romanticism . , . has in common, and that is 
a deep disgust with the world as it is and a desire to depict in 
literature something that is claimed to be nobler and better. — 
Essays on German Liter aiure, by H. H. Boyesen^ pp. 358 and 356. 



CHAPTER II. 
^be Budustana. 

The Romantic Movement in England was a part of 
the general European reaction against the spirit of the 
eighteenth century. This began somewhat earlier in 
England than in Germany, and very much earlier than 
in France, where literary conservatism went strangely 
hand in hand with political radicalism. In England 
the reaction was at first gradual, timid, and uncon- 
scious. It did not reach importance until the sev- 
enth decade of the century, and culminated only in 
the early years of the nineteenth century. The me- 
diaeval revival was only an incident — though a leading 
incident — of this movement ; but it is the side of it with 
which the present work will mainly deal. Thus I 
shall have a great deal to say about Scott; very little 
about Byron, intensely romantic as he was in many 
meanings of the word. This will not preclude me 
from glancing occasionally at other elements besides 
mediaevalism which enter into the concept of the 
term "romantic." 

Reverting then to our tentative definition — Heine's 
definition— of romanticism, as the reproduction in 
modern art and literature of the life of the Middle 
Ages, it should be explained that the expression, 
" Middle Ages," is to be taken here in a liberal sense. 
Contributions to romantic literature such as Macpher- 



The <^ugiistans. 25 

son's "Ossian," Collins' '' Ode on the Superstitions of 
the Scottish Highlands," and Gray's translations from 
the Welsh and the Norse, relate to periods which ante- 
date that era of Christian chivalry and feudalism, 
extending roughly from the eleventh century to the 
fifteenth, to which the term, "Middle Ages," more 
strictly applies. The same thing is true of the ground- 
work, at least, of ancient hero-epics like ** Beowulf" 
and the ** Nibelungen Lied," of the Icelandic " Sagas," 
and of similar products of old heathen Europe which 
have come down in the shape of mythologies, popu- 
lar superstitions, usages, rites, songs, and traditions. 
These began to fall under the notice of scholars about 
the middle of the last century and made a deep im- 
pression upon contemporary letters. 

Again, the influence of the Middle Age proper pro- 
longed itself beyond the exact close of the medieval 
period, which it is customary to date from the fall of 
Constantinople in 1453. The great romantic poets of 
Italy, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, wrote in the full flush 
of the pagan revival and made free use of the Greek 
and Roman mythologies and the fables of Homer, 
Vergil, and Ovid; and yet their work is hardly to be 
described as classical. Nor is the work of their 
English disciples, Spenser and Sidney; while the en- 
tire Spanish and English drama of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries (down to 1640, and with an 
occasional exception, like Ben Jonson) is romantic. 
Calderon is romantic; Shakspere and Fletcher are 
romantic. If we agree to regard medieval literature, 
then, as comprising all the early literature of Europe 
which drew its inspiration from other than Greek- 
Latin sources, we shall do no great violence to the 



26 ^ History of English %omanticism. 

usual critical employment of the word. I say ^arfy 
literature, in order to exclude such writings as are 
wholly modern, like "Robinson Crusoe," or " Gulliver's 
Travels," or Fielding's novels, which are neither classic 
nor romantic, but are the original creation of our own 
time. With works like these, though they are per- 
haps the most characteristic output of the eighteenth 
century, our inquiries are not concerned. 

It hardly needs to be said that the reproduction, or 
imitation, of mediaeval life by the eighteenth- and 
nineteenth-century romanticists, contains a large ad- 
mixture of modern thought and feeling. The brilliant 
pictures of feudal society in the romances of Scott 
and Fouque give no faithful image of that society, 
even when they are carefully correct in all ascertain- 
able historical details.* They give rather the im- 
pression left upon an alien mind by the quaint, 
picturesque features of a way of life which seemed 
neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived 
it, but only to the man who turns to it for relief from 
the prosaic, or at least familiar, conditions of the 

* As another notable weakness of the age is its habit of looking 
back, in a romantic and passionate idleness, to the past ages — not 
understanding them all the while ... so Scott gives up nearly 
the half of his intellectual power to a fond yet purposeless dreaming 
over the past ; and spends half his literary labors in endeavors to 
revive it, not in reality, but on the stage of fiction : endeavors 
which were the best of the kind that modernism made, but still suc- 
cessful only so far as Scott put under the old armor the everlasting 
human nature which he knew ; and totally unsuccessful so far as con- 
cerned the painting of the armor itself, which he knew nof, . . . 
His romance and antiquarianism, his knighthood and monkery, are 
all false, and he knows them to be false. — Ruskin, " Modern Paint- 
ers'' Vol. III. p. 279 (First American Edition, i860). 



The zAugustans. 27 

modern world. The offspring of the modern imagina- 
tion, acting upon medieval material, may be a per- 
fectly legitimate, though not an original, form of art. 
It may even have a novel charm of its own, unlike 
either parent, but like Euphorion, child of Faust by 
Helen of Troy, a blend of Hellas and the Middle Age. 
Scott's verse tales are better poetry than the English 
metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries. Tennyson has given a more perfect shape 
to the Arthurian legends than Sir Thomas Malory, 
their compiler, or Walter Map and Chrestien de Troyes, 
their possible inventors. But, of course, to study the 
Middle Age, as it really was, one must go not to Ten- 
nyson and Scott, but to the ''Chanson de Roland," 
and the ''Divine Comedy," and the " Romaunt of the 
Rose," and the chronicles of Villehardouin, Joinville, 
and Froissart. 

And the farther such study is carried, the more 
evident it becomes that " mediaeval " and " romantic " 
are not synonymous. The Middle Age was not, at all 
points, romantic: it is the modern romanticist who 
makes, or finds, it so. He sees its strange, vivid 
peculiarities under the glamour of distance. 
Chaucer's temper, for instance, was by no means ro- 
mantic. That "good sense " which Dryden mentions 
as his prominent trait; that "low tone" which Lowell 
praises in him, and which keeps him close to the com- 
mon ground of experience, pervade his greatest work, 
the " Canterbury Tales," with an insistent realism. It 
is true that Chaucer shared the beliefs and influences 
of his time and was a follower of its literary fashions. 
In his version of the "Romaunt of the Rose," his 
imitations of Machault, and his early work in general, 



28 e// History of English Romanticism. 

he used the mediaeval machinery of allegory and 
dreams. In " Troilus and Cresseide " and the tale of 
**Palamon and Arcite," he carries romantic love and 
knightly honor to a higher pitch than his model, Boc- 
caccio. But the shrewdly practical Pandarus of the 
former poem — a character almost wholly of Chaucer's 
creation — is the very embodiment of the anti-roman- 
tic attitude, and a remarkable anticipation of Sancho 
Panza; while the "Rime of Sir Thopas " is a dis- 
tinct burlesque of the fantastic chivalry romances.* 
Chaucer's pages are picturesque with tournament, 
hunting parties, baronial feasts, miracles of saints, 
feats of magic; but they are solid, as well, with the 
everyday life of fourteenth-century England. They 
have the naivete a.nd garrulity which are marks of me- 
diaeval work, but not the quaintness and grotesquerie 
which are held to be marks of romantic work. Not 
archaic speech, but a certain mental twist constitutes 
quaintness. Herbert and Fuller are quaint; Blake is 
grotesque; Donne and Charles Lamb are willfully 
quaint, subtle, and paradoxical. But Chaucer is 
always straight-grained, broad, and natural. 

Even Dante, the poet of the Catholic Middle Age; 
Dante, the mystic, the idealist, with his intense 
spirituality and his passion for symbolism, has been 
sometimes called classic, by virtue of the powerful 
construction of his great poem, and his scholastic 
rigidity of method. 
" The relation between modern romanticizing litera- 

* See also the sly hit at popular fiction in the Nonne Prestes Tale: 
" This story is also trewe, I undertake, 
As is the book of Launcelot de Lake, 
' That women hold in ful gret reverence." 



The ^ugustans. 29 

ture and the real literature of the Middle Ages, is 
something like that between the literature of the 
renaissance and the ancient literatures of Greece and 
Rome. But there is this difference, that, while the 
renaissance writers fell short of their pattern, the 
modern schools of romance have outgone their mas- 
ters — not perhaps in the intellectual — but certainly 
in the artistic value of their product. Mediaeval 
literature, wonderful and stimulating as a whole and 
beautiful here and there in details of execution, affords 
few models of technical perfection. The civilization 
which it reflected, though higher in its possibilities 
than the classic civilizations, had not yet arrived at an 
equal grade of development, was inferior in intelli- 
gence and the matured results of long culture. The 
epithets of Gothic ignorance, rudeness, and barbarism, 
which the eighteenth-century critics applied so freely 
to all the issue of the so-called dark ages, were not 
entirely without justification. Dante is almost the 
only strictly mediaeval poet in whose work the form 
seems adequate to the content; for Boccaccio and 
Petrarca stand already on the sill of the renaissance. 

In the arts of design the case was partly reversed. If 
the artists of the renaissance did not equal the Greeks 
in sculpture and architecture, they probably excelled 
them in painting. On the other hand, the restorers 
of Gothic have never quite learned the secret of the 
mediaeval builders. However, if the analogy is not 
pushed too far, the romantic revival may be regarded 
as a faint counterpart of the renaissance. Just as, in 
the fifteenth century, the fragments of a half-forgotten 
civilization were pieced together; Greek manuscripts 
sought out, cleaned, edited, and printed: statues, coins, 



so c/l History of English ^manticism. 

vases dug up and ranged in museums: debris cleared 
away from temples, amphitheaters, basilicas; till 
gradually the complete image of the antique world 
grew forth in august beauty, kindling an excitement 
of mind to which there are few parallels in history; 
j so, in the eighteenth century, the despised ages of 
monkery, feudalism, and superstition began to reassert 
their claims upon the imagination. Ruined castles 
and abbeys, coats of mail, illuminated missals, manu- 
script romances, black-letter ballads, old tapestries, 
and wood carvings acquired a new value. Antiquaries 
and virtuosos first, and then poets and romancers, 
reconstructed in turn an image of mediaeval society. 

True, the later movement was much the weaker of 
the two. No such fissure yawned between modern 
times and the Middle Ages as had been opened between 
the ancient world and the Middle Ages by the ruin of 
the Roman state and by the barbarian migrations. 
Nor had ten centuries of rubbish accumulated over the 
remains of mediaeval culture. In 1700 the Middle Ages 
were not yet so very remote. The nations and lan- 
guages of Europe continued in nearly the same limits 
which had bounded them two centuries before. The 
progress in the sciences and mechanic arts, the dis- 
covery and colonizing of America, the invention of 
printing and gunpowder, and the Protestant refor- 
mation had indeed drawn deep lines between modern 
and mediaeval life. Christianity, however, formed a 
connecting link, though, in Protestant countries, the 
continuity between the earlier and later forms of the 
religion had been interrupted. One has but to com- 
pare the list of the pilgrims whom Chaucer met at the 
Tabard, with the company that Captain Sentry or 



The ^ugustans. 3 ^ 

Peregrine Pickle would be likely to encounter at 
a suburban inn, to see how the face of English 
society had changed between 1400 and 1700. What 
has become of the knight, the prioress, the sumner, 
the monk, pardoner, squire, alchemist, friar; and 
where can they or their equivalents be found in all 
England? 

^ The limitations of my subject will oblige me to 
treat the English romantic movement as a chapter in 
literary history, even at the risk of seeming to adopt a 
narrow method. Yet it would be unphilosophical to 
consider it as a merely esthetic affair, and to lose 
sight altogether of its deeper springs in the religious 
and ethical currents of the time. For it was, in part, 
a return of warmth and color into English letters; 
and that was only a symptom of the return of warmth 
and color — that is, of emotion and imagination — into 
English life and thought: into the Church, into poli- 
tics, into philosophy. Romanticism, which sought to 
evoke from the past a beauty that it found wanting in 
the present, was but one phase of that revolt against 
the coldness and spiritual deadness of the first half 
of the eighteenth century which had other sides in the 
idealism of Berkeley, in the Methodist and Evangel- 
ical revival led by Wesley and Whitefield, and in the 
sentimentalism which manifested itself in the writings 
of Richardson and Sterne. Corresponding to these on 
the Continent were German pietism, the transcenden- 
tal philosophy of Kant and his continuators, and the 
emotional excesses of works like Rousseau's ** Nou- 
velle Heloise " and Goethe's ''Sorrows of Werther." 

Romanticism was something more, then, than a 
new literary mode; a taste cultivated by dilettante 



32 <iA History of English %omantidsm. 

virtuosos, like Horace Walpole, college recluses like 
Gray, and antiquarian scholars like Joseph and 
Thomas Warton. It was the effort of the poetic im- 
agination to create for itself a richer environment; 
but it was also, in its deeper significance, a reaching 
Out of the human spirit after a more ideal type of 
religion and ethics than it could find in the official 
churchmanship and the formal morality of the time. 
Mr. Leslie Stephen * points out the connection 
between the three currents of tendency known as 
sentimentalism, romanticism, and naturalism. He 
explains, to be sure, that the first English sentiment- 
alists, such as Richardson and Sterne, were anything 
but romantic. ** A more modern sentimentalist would 
probably express his feelings f by describing some past 
state of society. He would paint some ideal society 
in medissval times and revive the holy monk and the 
humble nun for our edification." He attributes the 
subsequent interest in the Middle Ages to the progress 
made in historical inquiries during the last half of the 
eighteenth century, and to the consequent growth 
of antiquarianism. "Men like Malone and Stevens 
were beginning those painful researches which have 
accumulated a whole literature upon the scanty 
records of our early dramatists. Gray, the most 
learned of poets, had vaguely designed a history of 
English poetry, and the design was executed with 
great industry by Thomas Warton. His brother 
Joseph ventured to uphold the then paradoxical thesis 

* " History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," Vol. 
II. chap. xii. section vii. 

f Sentimentalism approaches its subject through the feelings 
romanticism through the imagination. 



The (s/^ugustans. 33 

that Spenser was as great a man as Pope. Every- 
where a new interest was awakening in the minuter 
details of the past." At first, Mr. Stephen says, the 
result of these inquiries was "an unreasonable con- 
tempt for the past. The modern philosopher, who 
could spin all knowledge out of his own brain; the 
skeptic, who had exploded the ancient dogmas; or the 
free-thinker of any shade, who rejoiced in the destruc- 
tion of ecclesiastical tyranny, gloried in his conscious 
superiority to his forefathers. Whatever was old was 
absurd; and Gothic — an epithet applied to all me- 
diaeval art, philosophy, or social order — became a 
simple term of contempt." But "an antiquarian is 
naturally a conservative, and men soon began to love 
the times whose peculiarities they were so diligently 
studying. Men of imaginative minds promptly made 
the discovery that a new source of pleasure might 
be derived from these dry records. . . The * return 
to nature' expresses a sentiment which underlies . . . 
both the sentimental and romantic movements. . . 
To return to nature is, in one sense, to find a new 
expression for emotions which have been repressed 
by existing conventions; or, in another, to return to 
some simpler social order which had not yet suffered 
from those conventions. The artificiality attributed 
to the eighteenth century seems to mean that men 
were content to regulate their thoughts and lives by 
rules not traceable to first principles, but dependent 
upon a set of special and exceptional conditions. . . 
To get out of the ruts, or cast off the obsolete 
shackles, two methods might be adopted. The intel- 
lectual horizon might be widened by including a 
greater number of ages and countries; or men might 



\. 



34 c^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

try to fall back upon the thoughts and emotions com- 
mon to all races, and so cast off the superficial incrus- 
tation. The first method, that of the romanticists, 
aims at increasing our knowledge: the second, that 
of the naturalistic school, at basing our philosophy on 
deeper principles."* 

The classic, or pseudo-classic, period of English 
literature lasted from the middle of the seventeenth 
till the end of the eighteenth century. Inasmuch as 
the romantic revival was a protest against this reign- 
ing mode, it becomes necessary to inquire a little 
more closely what we mean when we say that the time 
of Queen Anne and the first two Georges was our 
Augustan or classical age. In what sense was it 
classical? And was it any more classical than the 
time of Milton, for example, or the time of Landor? 
If the **Dunciad," and the *' Essay on Man," are 

* Ruskin, too, indicates the common element in romanticism and 
naturalism — a desire to escape from the Augustan formalism. I 
condense the passage slightly : ' * To powder the hair, to patch the 
cheek, to hoop the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel 
of the same system which reduced streets to brick walls and pictures 
to brown stains. Reaction from this state was inevitable, and 
accordingly men steal out to the fields and mountains; and, finding 
among these color and liberty and variety and power, rejoice in all 
the wildest shattering of the mountain side, as an opposition to 
Gower Street. It is not, however, only to existing inanimate nature 
that our want of beauty in person and dress has driven us. The 
imagination of it, as it was seen in our ancestors, haunts us continu- 
ally. We look fondly back to the manners of the age of chivalry. 
The furniture and personages of our romance are sought in the 
centuries which we profess to have surpassed in everything. . . 
This romantic love of beauty, forced to seek in history and in 
external nature the satisfaction it cannot find in ordinary life."— 
Modern Painters, Vol. III. p. 260. 



The zAiigustans. 35 

classical, what is Keats' ''Hyperion"? And with 
what propriety can we bring under a common rubric 
things so far asunder as Prior's "Carmen Seculare " 
and Tennyson's ''Ulysses," or as Gay's "Trivia" 
and Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon " ? Evidently 
the Queen Anne writers took hold of the antique 
by a different side from our nineteenth-century poets. 
Their classicism was of a special type. It was, as has 
been often pointed out, more Latin than Greek, and 
more French than Latin.* It was, as has likewise 
been said, "a classicism in red heels and a periwig." 
Victor Hugo speaks of "cette poesie fardee, 
mouchetee, poudree, du dix-huitieme siecle, cette 
litterature a paniers, a pompons et a falbalas." f The 
costumes of Watteau contrast with the simple folds 

* Although devout in their admiration for antiquity, the writers 
of the seventeenth century have by no means always clearly grasped 
the object of their cult. Though they may understand Latin tradi- 
tion, they have certainly never entered into the freer, more original 
spirit of Greek art. They have but an incomplete, superficial con- 
ception of Hellenism. . . Boileau celebrates but does not under- 
stand Pindar. . . The seventeenth century comprehended Homer 
no better than Pindar. What we miss in them is exactly what we 
like best in his epopee — the vast living picture of a semi-barbarous 
civilization. . . No society could be less fitted than that of the 
seventeenth century to feel and understand the spirit of primitive 
antiquity. In order to appreciate Homer, it was thought necessary 
to civilize the barbarian, make him a scrupulous writer, and convince 
him that the word " ass" is a " very noble " expression in Greek. — 
Pellissier : ' ' T/i^ Literary Move7?ieut in France " {Brinton^s trans- 
lation, 1897), pp. 8-10. So Addison apologizes for Homer's failure 
to observe those qualities of nicety, correctness, and what the French 
call biens/ance (decorum,) the necessity of which had only been found 
out in later times. See The Spectator, No. l6o. 

f Preface to "Cromwell." 



$6 cA History of English %omanticism. 

of Greek drapery very much as the ''Rape of the 
Lock," contrasts with the Iliad, or one of Pope's 
pastorals with an idyl of Theocritus. The times were 
artificial in poetry as in dress — 

" Tea-cup times of hood and hoop, 
And when the patch was worn." 

Gentlemen wore powdered wigs instead of their own 
hair, and the powder and the wig both got into their 
writing. Perruque was the nickname applied to the 
classicists by the French romanticists of Hugo's 
generation, who wore their hair long and flowing — 
cheveux mdrovingiennes — and affected an oiitt'^ freedom 
in the cut and color of their clothes. Similarly the 
Byronic collar became, all over Europe, the symbol 
of daring independence in matters of taste and 
opinion. Its careless roll, which left the throat 
exposed, seemed to assist the liberty of nature 
against cramping conventions. 

The leading Queen Anne writers are so well known 
that a somewhat general description of the literary 
situation in England at the time of Pope's death 
(1744) will serve as an answer to the question, how 
was the eighteenth century classical. It was re- 
marked by Thomas Warton * that, at the first revival 
of letters in the sixteenth century, our authors were 
more struck by the marvelous fables and inventions 
of ancient poets than by the justness of their concep- 
tions and the purity of their style. In other words, . 
the men of the renaissance apprehended the ancient 
literatures as poets: the men of the eclaircissnnenf 

* " History of English Poetry," section Ixi. Vol. III. p. 398 (edition 
of 1840). 



The tAugustans. 37 

apprehended them as critics. In Elizabeth's day the 
new learning stimulated English genius to creative 
activity. In royal progresses, court masques, Lord 
Mayors' shows, and public pageants of all kinds, 
mythology ran mad. *' Every procession was a 
pantheon." But the poets were not careful to keep 
the two worlds of pagan antiquity and mediaeval 
Christianity distinct. The art of the renaissance was 
the flower of a double root, and the artists used their 
complex stuff naively. The ** Faerie Queene" is the. 
typical work of the English renaissance; there hama- 
dryads, satyrs, and river gods mingle unblushingly 
with knights, dragons, sorcerers, hermits, and per- 
sonified vices and virtues. The ** machinery " of 
Homer and Vergil — the *' machinery " of the ** Seven 
Champions of Christendom" and the ** Roman de la 
Rose"! This was not shocking to Spenser's con- 
temporaries, but it seemed quite shocking to classical 
critics a century later. Even Milton, the greatest 
scholar among English poets, but whose imagination 
was a strong agent, holding strange elements in solu- 
tion, incurred their censure for bringing Saint Peter 
and the sea-nymphs into dangerous juxtaposition in 
** Lycidas." 

But by the middle of the seventeenth century the 
renaissance schools of poetry had become effete in 
all European countries. They had run into extrav- 
agances of style, into a vicious manner known in 
Spain as Gongorism, in Italy as Marinism, and in 
England best exhibited in the verse of Donne and 
Cowley and the rest of the group whom Dr. Johnson 
called the metaphysical poets, and whose Gothicism 
of taste Addison ridiculed in his Spectator papers 



38 e/^ History of English Romanticism, 

on true and false wit. It was France that led the . 
reform against this fashion. Malherbe and Boileau 
insisted upon the need of discarding tawdry orna- 
ments of style and cultivating simplicity, clearness, 
propriety, decorum, moderation; above all, good sense. 
The new Academy, founded to guard the purity of 
the French language, lent its weight to the precepts 
of the critics, who applied the rules of Aristotle, as 
commented by Longinus and Horace, to modern con- 
ditions. The appearance of a number of admirable 
writers — Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Bossuet, La 
Fontaine, La Bruyere — simultaneously with this criti- 
cal movement, gave an authority to the new French 
literature which enabled it to impose its principles 
upon England and Germany for over a century. For 
the creative literature of France conformed its prac- i 
tice, in the main, to the theory of French criticism; 
though not, in the case of Corneille, without some 
protest; and not, in the case of Regnier, without open 
defiance. This authority was re-enforced by the polit- 
ical glories and social /dat of the si^c/e de Louis 
Quatorze. 

It happened that at this time the Stuart court was . 
in exile, and in the train of Henrietta Maria at Paris, 
or scattered elsewhere through France, were many 
royalist men of letters, Etherege, Waller, Cowley, and 
others, who brought back with them to England in 
1660 an acquaintance with this new French literature 
and a belief in its aesthetic code. That French in- 
fluence would have spread into England without the 
aid of these political accidents is doubtless true, as it 
is also true that a reform of English versification and 
poetic style would have worked itself out upon native 



The zAugustans. 39 

lines independent of foreign example, and even had 
there been no such thing as French literature. Mr. 
Gosse has pointed out couplets of Waller, written as 
early as 1623, which have the formal precision of 
Pope's; and the famous passage about the Thames in 
Denham's "Cooper's Hill" (1642) anticipates the 
best performance of Augustan verse: 

" O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream 
My great example, as it is my theme! 
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, 
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." 

However, as to the general fact of the powerful im- 
pact of French upon English literary fashions, in the 
latter half of the seventeenth century, there can be 
no dispute.* 

This change of style was symptomatic of a corre- 
sponding change in the national temper. It was the 
mission of the eighteenth century to assert the uni- 
versality of law and, at the same time, the sufficiency of 
the reason to discover the laws which govern in every 
province: a service which we now, perhaps, under- 
value in our impatience with the formalism which 
was its outward sign. Hence its dislike of irregu- 
larity in art and irrationality in religion. England, 
in particular, was tired of unchartered freedom, of 
spiritual as well as of literary anarchy. The religious 
tension of the Commonwealth period had relaxed — 
men cannot be always at the heroic pitch — and theo- 
logical disputes had issued in indiiference and a skep- 

*See, for a fuller discussion of this subject, " From Shakspere to 
Pope : An Inquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of 
Classical Poetry in England," by Edmund Gosse, 1885. 



40 <iA History of English Romanticism. 

ticism which took the form of deism, or ''natural 
religion." But the deists were felt to be a nuisance. 
They were unsettling opinions and disturbing that 
decent conformity with generally received beliefs 
which it is the part of a good citizen to maintain. 
Addison instructs his readers that, in the absence of 
certainty, it is the part of a prudent man to choose 
the safe side and make friends with God. The free- 
thinking Chesterfield * tells his son that the profes- 
sion of atheism is ill-bred. De Foe, Swift, Richardson, 
Fielding, Johnson all attack infidelity. "Conform! 
conform! " said in effect the most authoritative 
writers of the century. "Be sensible: go to church: 
pay your rates: don't be a vulgar deist — a fellow like 
Toland who is poor and has no social position. But, 
on the other hand, you need not be a fanatic or 
superstitious, or an enthusiast. Above all, J>as de 
zlle! " 

"Theology," says Leslie Stephen, "was, for the ^ 
most part, almost as deistical as the deists. A hatred 
for enthusiasm was as strongly impressed upon the 
whole character of contemporary thought as a hatred 
of skepticism. . . A good common-sense religion 
should be taken for granted and no questions asked. 
, . With Shakspere, or Sir Thomas Browne, or 
Jeremy Taylor, or Milton, man is contemplated in 
his relations to the universe; he is in presence of eter- 
nity and infinity; life is a brief drama; heaven and 
hell are behind the veil of phenomena; at every step 

* The cold-hearted, polished Chesterfield is a very representative 
figure. Johnson, who was really devout, angrily affirmed that his 
celebrated letters taught ' ' the morality of a whore with the manners 
of a dancing-master." 



7he zAugustans. 41 

our friends vanish into the abyss of ever present mys- 
tery. To all such thoughts the writers of the eight- 
eenth century seemed to close their eyes as resolutely 
as possible. . . The absence of any deeper specula- 
tive ground makes the immediate practical questions 
of life all the more interesting. We know not what 
we are, nor whither we are going, nor whence we 
come; but we can, by the help of common sense, dis- 
cover a sufficient share of moral maxims for our guid- 
ance in life. . . Knowledge of human nature, as it 
actually presented itself in the shifting scene before 
them, and a vivid appreciation of the importance of 
the moral law, are the staple of the best literature of 
the time."* 

The God of the deists was, in truth, hardly more 
impersonal than the abstraction worshiped by the 
orthodox — the ** Great Being " of Addison's essays, the 
"Great First Cause" of Pope's ** Universal Prayer," 
invoked indifferently as ''Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." 
Dryden and Pope were professed Catholics, but there 
is nothing to distinguish their so-called sacred poetry 
from that of their Protestant contemporaries. Con- 
trast the mere polemics of ''The Hind and the Pan- 
ther" with really Catholic poems like Southwell's 
" Burning Babe " and Crashaw's " Flaming Heart," or 
even with Newman's "Dream of Gerontius." In his 
"Essay on Man," Pope versified, without well un- 
derstanding, the optimistic deism of Leibnitz, as 
expounded by Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke. The An- 
glican Church itself was in a strange condition, when 

* ** History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," Vol. 
II. chap. xii. section iv. See also " Selections from Newman," by 
Lewis E. Gates, Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii. (1895). 



f 



42 <iA History of English Romanticism. 

Jonathan Swift, a dean and would-be bishop, came to 
its defense with his " Tale of a Tub " and his ironical 
*' Argument against the Abolition of Christianity." 
Among the Queen Anne wits Addison was the man of 
most genuine religious feeling. He is always rever- 
ent, and **the feeling infinite" stirs faintly in one or 
two of his hymns. But, in general, his religion is of 
the rationalizing type, a religion of common sense, 
a belief resting upon logical deductions, a system of 
ethics in which the supernatural is reduced to the 
lowest terms, and from which the glooms and fervors 
of a deep spiritual experience are almost entirely 
absent. This ''parson in a tie-wig" is constantly 
preaching against zeal, enthusiasm, superstition, mys- 
ticism, and recommending a moderate, cheerful, and 
reasonable religion.* It is instructive to contrast his 
amused contempt for popular beliefs in ghosts, witches, 
dreams, prognostications, and the like, with the re- 
awakened interest in folk lore evidenced by such a 
book as Scott's '' Demonology and Witchcraft." 

Queen Anne literature was classical, then, in its 
lack of those elements of mystery and aspiration which 
we have found described as of the essence of roman- 
ticism. It was emphatically a literature of this world. 
It ignored all vague emotion, the phenomena of sub- 
consciousness, **the electric chain wherewith we are 
darkly bound," the shadow that rounds man's little 
life, and fixed its attention only upon what it could 
thoroughly comprehend, f Thereby it escaped obscu- 

* See especially Spectator, Nos. 185, 186, 201, 381, and 494. 

f The classical Lander's impatience of mysticism explains his dis- 
like of Plato, the mystic among Greeks. Diogenes says to Plato : 
" I meddle not at present with infinity or eternity : when I can 



The cAtigtistans. 43 

rity. The writings of the Augustans in both verse 
and prose are distinguished by a perfect clearness, 
but it is a clearness without subtlety or depth. They 
never try to express a thought, or to utter a feeling, 
that is not easily intelligible. The mysticism of 
Wordsworth, the incoherence of Shelley, the darkness 
of Browning — to take only modern instances — pro- 
ceed, however, not from inferior art, but from the 
greater difficulty of finding expression for a very dif- 
ferent order of ideas. 

Again the literature of the Restoration and Queen 
Anne periods — which may be regarded as one, for 
present purposes — was classical, or at least unroman- 
tic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of 
curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its 
coldness of feeling, the tameness of its imagination, 
and its narrow and imperfect sense of beauty. It was 
a literature not simply of this v/orld, but of the world, 
of the beau monde, high life, fashion, society, the court 
and the town, the salons, clubs, coffee-houses, assem- 
blies, ombre-parties. It was social, urban, gregarious, 
intensely though not broadly human. It cared little for 
the country or outward nature, and nothing for the life, 
of remote times and places. Its interest was centered 
upon civilization and upon that peculiarly artificial 
type of civilization which it found prevailing. It was 
as indifferent to Venice, Switzerland, the Alhambra, 
the Nile, the American forests, and the islands of the 
South Sea as it was to the Middle Ages and the man- 
ners of Scotch Highlanders. The sensitiveness to the 

comprehend them, I will talk about them," "Imaginary Conver- 
sations," 2(1 series, Conversation XV. Landor's contempt for Ger- 
man literature is significant. 



44 c^ History of English "^manticism. 

picturesque, the liking for local color and for what- 
ever is striking, characteristic, and peculiarly national 
in foreign ways is a romantic note. The eighteenth 
century disliked ** strangeness added to beauty"; it 
disapproved of anything original, exotic, tropical, 
bizarre for the same reason that it disapproved of 
mountains and Gothic architecture. 

Professor Gates says that the work of English liter- 
ature during the first quarter of the present century 
was *' the rediscovery and vindication of the concrete. 
The special task of the eighteenth century had been 
to order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite 
methods had been analysis and generalization. It 
asked for no new experience. . . The abstract, the 
typical, the general — these were everywhere exalted 
at the expense of the image, the specific experience, 
the vital fact."* Classical tragedy, e. g., undertook 
to present only the universal, abstract, permanent 
truths of human character and passion, f The impres- 

* "Selections from Newman," Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii. 

f Racine observes that good sense and reason are the same in all 
ages. What is the result of this generalization ? Heroes can be 
transported from epoch to epoch, from country to country, without 
causing surprise. Their Achilles is no more a Greek than is Porus 
an Indian; Andromache feels and talks like a seventeenth-century 
princess : Phaedra experiences the remorse of a Christian. — Pellis- 
sier, " Literary Movement in France'' p. i8. 

In substituting men of concrete, individual lives for the ideal fig- 
ures of tragic art, romanticism was forced to determine their physi- 
ognomy by a host of local, casual details. In the name of universal 
truth the classicists rejected the coloring of time and place ; and this 
is precisely what the romanticists seek under the name of particular 
reality. — Ibid. p. 220. Similarly Montezuma's Mexicans in Dryden's 
"Indian Emperor" have no more national individuality than the 
Spanish Moors in his " Conquest of Granada." The only attempt at 



The fiAiigustans. 45, 

sion of the mysterious East upon modern travelers 
and poets like Byron, Southey, De Quincey, Moore, 
Hugo,* Ruckert, and Gerard de Nerval, has no coun- 
terpart in the eighteenth century. The Oriental alle- 
gory or moral apologue, as practiced by Addison in 
such papers as *' The Vision of Mirza," and by John- 
son in *'Rasselas," is rather faintly colored and gets 
what color it has from the Old Testament. It is sig- 
nificant that the romantic Collins endeavored to give a 
novel turn to the decayed pastoral by writing a num- 
ber of *' Oriental Eclogues," in which dervishes and 
camel-drivers took the place of shepherds, but the ex- 
periment was not a lucky one. Milton had more of 
the East in his imagination than any of his success- 
ors. His *' vulture on Imaus bred, whose snowy ridge 
the roving Tartar bounds"; his "plain of Sericana 
where Chineses drive their cany wagons light"; his 
*• utmost Indian isle Taprobane," are touches of the 
picturesque which anticipate a more modern mood 
than Addison's. 

*' The difference," says Matthew Arnold, "between 
genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and 
all their school is briefly this: their poetry is conceived 
and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is con- 
ceived and composed in the soul." The representative 
minds of the eighteenth century were such as Voltaire, 
the master of persiflage, destroying superstition with 

local color in * ' Aurungzebe " — an heroic play founded on the his- 
tory of a contemporary East Indian potentate who died seven years 
after the author — is the introduction of the suttee, and one or two 
mentions of elephants. 

* See " Les Orientales " (Hugo) and Nerval's " Les Nuits du 
Rhamadan" and " La Lejrende du Calife Hakem." 



46 fiA History of English l^pmanticism, 

his sourire hideux; Gibbon, " the lord of irony," ** sap- 
ping a solemn creed with solemn sneer "; and Hume, 
with his thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his 
dry Toryism, and cool contempt for ''zeal" of any 
kind. The characteristic products of the era were 
satire, burlesque, and travesty: *' Hudibras," ''Absa- 
lom and Achitophel," "The Way of the World," 
"Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock." 
There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like 
Prior's "Ballad on the Taking of Namur" and "The 
Country Mouse and the City Mouse"; Buckingham's 
" Rehearsal " and Swift's "Meditation on a Broom- 
stick"; mock-heroics, like the " Dunciad " and 
" MacFlecknoe " and Garth's " Dispensary," and John 
Phillips' "Splendid Shilling" and Addison's " Ma- 
chinae Gesticulantes"; Prior's "Alma," a burlesque 
of philosophy; Gay's "Trivia" and "The Shepherd's 
Week," and "The Beggars' Opera" — a "Newgate 
pastoral"; "Town Eclogues" by Swift and Lady 
Montague and others. Literature was a polished 
mirror in which the gay world saw its own grinning 
face. It threw back a most brilliant picture of the 
surface of society, showed manners but not the ele- 
mentary passions of human nature. As a whole, it 
leaves an impression of hardness, shallowness, and lev- 
ity. The polite cynicism of Congreve, the ferocious 
cynicism of Swift, the malice of Pope, the pleasantry 
of Addison, the easy worldliness of Prior and Gay are 
seldom relieved by any touch of the ideal. The prose 
of the time was excellent, but the poetry was merely 
rhymed prose. The recent Queen Anne revival in 
architecture, dress, and bric-a-brac, the recrudescence 
of society verse in Dobson and others, is perhaps 



The <^ugustans. 47 

symptomatic of the fact that the present generation 
has entered upon a prosaic reaction against romantic 
excesses and we are finding our picturesque in that era 
of artifice which seemed so unpicturesque to our fore- 
runners. The sedan chair, the blue china, the fan, 
farthingale, and powdered head dress have now got the 
*' rime of age " and are seen in fascinating perspective, 
even as the mailed courser, the buff jerkin, the cowl, 
and the cloth-yard shaft were seen by the men of 
Scott's generation. 

Once more, the eighteenth century was classical in , 
its respect for authority. It desired to put itself 
under discipline, to follow the rules, to discover a 
formula of correctness in all the arts, to set up a 
tribunal of taste and establish canons of composition, 
to maintain standards, copy models and patterns, 
comply with conventions, and chastise lawlessness. 
In a word, its spirit was academic. Horace was its 
favorite master — not Horace of the Odes, but Horace 
of the Satires and Epistles, and especially Horace as 
interpreted by Boileau.* The *'Ars Poetica " had 
been englished by the Earl of Roscommon, and 
imitated by Boileau in his ^'L'Art Poetique," which 
became the parent of a numerous progeny in England; 
among others an " Essay on Satire " and an '* Essay 
on Poetry," by the Earl of Mulgrave; f an ** Essay on 

*The rules a nation, born to serve, obeys; 
And Boileau still in right of Horace sways. 

— Fo^g, ''''Essay on Criticism'^ 
\ These critical verse essays seem to have been particularly affected 
by this order of the peerage ; for, somewhat later, we have one, 
"On Unnatural Flights in Poetry," by the Earl of Lansdowne — 
" Granville the polite." 



48 <iA History of English ^Romanticism. 

Translated Verse" by the Earl of Roscommon, who, 
says Addison, ''makes even rules a noble poetry ";* 
and Pope's well-known *' Essay on Criticism." 

The doctrine of Pope's essay is, in brief, follow 
Nature, and in order that you may follow Nature^ 
observe the rules, which are only *' Nature metho- 
dized," and also imitate the ancients. 

" Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem ; 
To copy nature is to copy them." 

Thus Vergil when he started to compose the ^neid 
may have seemed above the critic's law, but when he 
came to study Homer, he found that Nature and 
Homer were the same. Accordingly, 

" he checks the bold design, 
And rules as strict his labor'd work confine." 

Not to stimulate, but to check, to confine, to regulate,, 
is the unfailing precept of this whole critical school. 
Literature, in the state in which they found it, appeared 
to them to need the curb more than the spur. 

Addison's scholarship was almost exclusively 
Latin, though it was Vergilian rather than Horatian. 
Macaulay f says of Addison's "Remarks on Italy": 
"To the best of our remembrance, Addison does not 
mention Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Boiardo, Berni, 
Lorenzo de' Medici, or Machiavelli. He coldly tells us 
that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of Ariosto, and that 
at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso. 
But for Tasso and Ariosto he cared far less than for 
Valerius Flaccus and Sidonius Apollinaris. The gentle 

* " Epistle to Sacheverel." f " Essay on Addison. "^ 



The zAugustans. 49 

flow of the Ticino brings a line of Silius to his mind. 
The sulphurous stream of Albula suggests to him 
several passages of Martial. But he has not a word 
to say of the illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he 
crosses the wood of Ravenna* without recollecting 
the specter huntsman, and wanders up and down 
Rimini without one thought of Francesca. At Paris 
he had eagerly sought an introductien to Boileau; 
but he seems not to have been at all aware that at 
Florence he was in the vicinity of a poet with whom 
Boileau could not sustain a comparison: of the 
greatest lyric poet of modern times [!] Vincenzio 
Filicaja. . . The truth is that Addison knew little 
and cared less about the literature of modern Italy. 
His favorite models were Latin. His favorite critics 
were French. Half the Tuscan poetry that he had 
read seemed to him monstrous and the other half 
tawdry." f 

There was no academy in England, but there was 
a critical tradition that was almost as influential. 
French critics gave the law: Boileau, Dacier, LeBossu, 
Rapin, Bouhours; English critics promulgated it: Den- 
nis, Langbaine, Rymer, Gildon, and others now little 

* Sweet hour of twilight ! — in the solitude 
Of the pine forest, and the silent shore 
Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood, 

Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er, 
To where the last Caesarian fortress stood. 

Evergreen forest ! which Boccaccio's lore 
And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me, 
How have I loved the twilight hour and thee ! 

— Don Juan. 
\1 must entirely agree with Monsieur Boileau, that one verse of 
Vergil is worth all the clinquant or tinsel of Tasso. — Spectator, No. 5, 



50 <t^ History of English ^Romanticism. 

read. Three writers of high authority in three suc- 
cessive generations — Dryden, Addison, and Johnson — 
consolidated a body of literary opinion which may be 
described, in the main, as classical, and as consenting, 
though with minor variations. Thus it was agreed on 
all hands that it was a writer's duty to be '* correct." 
It was well indeed to be " bold," but bold with discre- 
tion. Dryden thought Shakspere a greater poet than 
Jonson, but an inferior artist. He was to be admired, 
but not approved. Homer, again, it was generally 
conceded, was not so correct as Vergil, though he had 
more '* fire." Chesterfield preferred Vergil to Homer, 
and both of them to Tasso. But of all epics the one 
he read with most pleasure was the *' Henriade." As 
for ** Paradise Lost," he could not read it through. 
William Walsh, " the muses' judge and friend," advised 
the youthful Pope that "there was one way still left 
open for him, by which he might excel any of his pred- 
ecessors, which was by correctness; that though 
indeed we had several great poets, we as yet could 
boast of none that were perfectly correct; and that 
therefore he advised him to make this quality his par- 
ticular study." "The best of the moderns in all 
languages," he wrote to Pope, "are those that have 
the nearest copied the ancients." Pope was thankful 
for the counsel' and mentions its giver in the "Essay 
on Criticism " as one who had 

" taught his muse to sing, 
Prescribed her heights and pruned her tender wing." 

But what was correct? In the drama, e. g., the ob- 
servance of the unities was almost universally recom- 
mended, but by no means universally practiced. 



7he <^ugustans. 5 r 

Johnson, himself a sturdy disciple of Dryden and 
Pope, exposed the fallacy of that stage illusion, on the 
supposed necessity of which the unities of time and 
place were defended. Yet Johnson, in his own tragedy 
*' Irene," conformed to the rules of Aristotle. He pro- 
nounced **Cato" " unquestionably the noblest produc- 
tion of Addison's genius," but acknowledged that its 
success had '* introduced, or confirmed among us, the 
use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaffecting elegance 
and chill philosophy." On the other hand Addison 
had small regard for poetic justice, which Johnson 
thought ought to be observed. Addison praised old 
English ballads, which Johnson thought mean and fool- 
ish; and he guardedly commends* **the fairy way of 
writing," a romantic foppery that Johnson despised. f 

Critical opinion was pronounced in favor of separat- 
ing tragedy and comedy, and Addison wrote one sen- < 
tence which condemns half the plays of Shakspereand 
Fletcher: '* The tragi-comedy, which is the product of 
the English theater, is one of the most monstrous in- 
ventions that ever entered into a poet's thought." J 
Dryden made some experiments in tragi-comedy, but, 
in general, classical comedy was pure comedy — the 
prose comedy of manners — and classical tragedy ad- 
mitted no comic intermixture. Whether tragedy 
should be in rhyme, after the French manner, or in 
blank verse, after the precedent of the old English 
stage, was a moot point. Dryden at first argued for 
rhyme and used it in his "heroic plays"; and it is 
significant that he defended its use on the ground that 

* spectator, No. 419. 
I See his " Life of Collins." % Spectator, No. 40. 



52 (vf History of English ^{omanticism. 

it would act as a check upon the poet's fancy. But 
afterward he grew ''weary of his much-loved mistress, 
rhyme," and went back to blank verse in his later- 
plays. 

As to poetry other than dramatic, the Restoration 
critics were at one in judging blank verse too " low " 
for a poem of heroic dimensions; and though Ad- 
dison gave it the preference in epic poetry, John- 
son was its persistent foe, and regarded it as little 
short of immoral. But for that matter. Gray could en- 
dure no blank verse outside of Milton. This is curi- 
ous, that rhyme, a mediaeval invention, should have 
been associated in the last century with the classical 
school of poetry; while blank verse, the nearest Eng- 
lish equivalent of the language of Attic tragedy, was a 
shibboleth of romanticizing poets, like Thomson and 
Akenside. The reason was twofold: rhyme came 
stamped with the authority of the French tragic alex- 
andrine; and, secondly, it meant constraint where 
blank verse meant freedom, ''ancient liberty, recov- 
ered to heroic song after the troublesome and mod- 
ern bondage of rhyming."* Pope, among his many 
thousand rhymed couplets, has left no blank verse ex- 
cept the few lines contributed to Thomson's "Sea- 
sons." Even the heroic couplet as written by earlier 
poets was felt to have been too loose in structure. 
" The excellence and dignity of it," says Dryden, "were 
never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it; he first 
made writing easily an art; first showed us how to con- 
clude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in 
the verse of those before him, runs on for so many 

* " The Verse": Preface to '• Paradise Lost." 



The zAugustans. 53 

lines together, that the reader is out of breath to 
overtake it."* All through the classical period the 
tradition is constant that Waller was the first modern 
English poet, the first correct versifier. Pope is 
praised by Johnson because he employed but sparingly 
the triplets and alexandrines by which Dryden sought 
to vary the monotony of the couplet; and he is cen- 
sured by Cowper because, by force of his example, he 
'' made poetry a mere mechanic art." Henceforth the 
distich was treated as a unit: the first line was bal- 
anced against the second, and frequently the first half 
of the line against the second half. 

" To err is human, to forgive divine." 

" And so obliging, that he ne'er obliged." 

" Charms strike the eye, but merit wins the soul," etc., etc. 

This type of verse, which Pope brought to perfec- 
tion, and to which he gave all the energy and variety 
of which it was capable, so prevailed in our poetry for 
a century or more that one almost loses sight of the 
fact that any other form was employed. The sonnet, 
for instance, disappeared entirely, until revived by 
Gray, Stillingfleet, Edwards, and Thomas Warton, 
about the middle of the eighteenth century.f When 
the poets wished to be daring and irregular, they were 
apt to give vent in that species of pseudo-Pindaric ode 
which Cowley had introduced — a literary disease which, 

* Dedicatory epistle to " The Rival Ladies." 

f Mr. Gosse says that a sonnet by Pope's friend Walsh is the only 
one " v^'ritten in English between Milton's in 1658, and Warton's 
about 1750," Ward's "English Poets," Vol. III. p. 7. The state- 
ment would have been more precise if he had said published instead 
of written. 



54 ^ History of English %omanticism. 

Dr. Johnson complained, infected the British muse 
with the notion that ''he who could do nothing else 
could write like Pindar." 

Sir Charles Eastlake in his " History of the Gothic 
Revival " testifies to this formal spirit from the point 
of view of another art than literature. " The age in 
which Batty Langley lived was an age in which it was 
customary to refer all matters of taste to rule and 
method. There was one standard of excellence in 
poetry — a standard that had its origin in the smooth 
distichs of heroic verse which Pope was the first to 
perfect, and which hundreds of later rhymers who 
lacked his nobler powers soon learned to imitate. In 
pictorial art, it was the grand school which exercised 
despotic sway over the efforts of genius and limited the 
painter's inventions to the field of Pagan mythology, 
'j In architecture, Vitruvius was the great authority. 
■ The graceful majesty of the Parthenon — the noble pro- 
portions of the temple of Theseus — the chaste enrich- 
ment which adorns the Choragic monument of Lysic- 
rates, were ascribed less to the fertile imagination and 
refined perceptions of the ancient Greek, than to the 
dry and formal precepts which were invented centuries 
after their erection. Little was said of the magnificent 
sculpture which filled the metopes of the temple of 
Minerva; but the exact height and breadth of the trig- 
lyphs between them were considered of the greatest 
importance. The exquisite drapery of caryatids and 
canephorae, no English artist, a hundred years ago, 
thought fit to imitate; but the cornices which they 
supported were measured inch by inch with the utmost 
nicety. Ingenious devices were invented for enabling 
the artificer to reproduce, by a series of complicated 



The zAugustans. 55 

curves, the profile of a Doric capital, which probably 
owed its form to the steady hand and uncontrolled 
taste of the designer. To put faith in many of the 
theories propounded by architectural authorities in 
the last century, would be to believe that some of the 
grandest monuments which the world has ever seen 
raised, owe their chief beauty to an accurate knowl- 
edge of arithmetic. The diameter of the column was 
divided into modules: the modules were divided into 
minutes; the minutes into fractions of themselves. A 
certain height was allotted to the shaft, another to the 
entablature. . . Sometimes the learned discussed 
how far apart the columns of a portico might be." * 

This kind of mensuration reminds one of the disputes 
between French critics as to whether the unity of 
time meant thirty hours, or twenty-four, or twelve, or 
the actual time that it took to act the play; or of the 
geometric method of the ''Saturday papers" in the 
Spectator. Addison tries ''Paradise Lost" by Aris- 
totle's rules for the composition of an epic. Is it 
the narrative of a single great action? Does it begin 
in medias res, as is proper, or ab ovo Ledce, as Horace 
has said that an epic ought not? Does it bring in the 
introductory matter by way of episode, after the ap- 
proved recipe of Homer and Vergil? Has it allegori- 
cal characters, contrary to the practice of the ancients? 
Does the poet intrude personally into his poem, thus 
mixing the lyric and epic styles? etc. Not a word as 
to Milton's Puritanism, or his Weltanschauung, or 
the relation of his work to its environment. Noth- 
ing of that historical and sympathetic method — that 

* " History of the Gothic Revival," pp. 49-50 (edition of 1872). 



$6 <iA History of English %omanticism. 

endeavor to put the reader at the poet's point of 
view — by which modern critics, from Lessing to Sainte- 
Beuve, have revolutionized their art. Addison looks 
at "Paradise Lost" as something quite distinct from 
Milton : as a manufactured article to be tested by com- 
paring it with standard fabrics by recognized makers, 
like the authors of the Iliad and ^neid. 

When the Queen Anne poetry took a serious 
turn, the generalizing spirit of the age led it almost 
always into the paths of ethical and didactic verse. 
**It stooped to truth and moralized its song," finding 
its favorite occupation in the sententious expression 
of platitudes — the epigram in satire, the maxim in 
serious work. It became a poetry of aphorisms, 
instructing us with Pope that 

"Virtue alone is happiness below;" 

or, with Young, that 

" Procrastination is the thief of time; " 
or, with Johnson, that 

" Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." 

When it attempted to deal concretely with the passions, 
it found itself impotent. Pope's *' Epistle of Eloisa 
to Abelard " rings hollow: it is rhetoric, not poetry. 
The closing lines of " The Dunciad " — so strangely 
overpraised by Thackeray — with their metallic clank 
and grandiose verbiage, are not truly imaginative. 
The poet is simply working himself up to a climax of 
the false sublime, as an orator deliberately attaches a 
sounding peroration to his speech. Pope is always 
"heard," never "overheard." 



The zAiigiistans, 5 7 

The poverty of the classical period in lyrical verse is 
particularly significant, because the song is the most 
primitive and spontaneous kind of poetry, and the most 
direct utterance of personal feeling. Whatever else 
the poets of Pope's time could do, they could not sing. 
They are the despair of the anthologists.* Here and 
there among the brilliant reasoners, 7'aconteurs, and 
satirists in verse, occurs a clever epigrammatist like 
Prior, or a ballad writer like Henry Carey, whose 
*' Sally in Our Alley " shows the singing, and not talk- 
ing, voice, but hardly the lyric cry. Gay's '' Blackeyed 
Susan " has genuine quality, though its rococo graces are 
more than half artificial. Sweet William is very much 
such an opera sailor-man as Bumkinet or Grubbinol is a 
shepherd, and his wooing is beribboned with conceits 
like these: 

" If to fair India's coast we sail, 

Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright, 
Thy breath is Afric's spicy gale, 

Thy skin is ivory so white. 
Thus every beauteous prospect that I view, 
Wakes in my soul some charm of lovely Sue." 

It was the same with the poetry of outward nature 
as with the poetry of human passion, f In Addison's 
''Letter from Italy," in Pope's "Pastorals," and 

* Palgrave says that the poetry of passion was defornifid, after 1660, 
by " levity and an artificial tone "; and that it lay " almost dormant 
for the hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and 
the days of Burns and Cowper," "Golden Treasury " (Sever and 
Francis edition, 1866), pp. 379-80. 

f Excepting the " Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchelsea, and a 
passage or two in the ' * Windsor Forest " of Pope, the poetry of the 
period intervening between the publication of the " Paradise Lost" 



58 (sA History of English %omanticism, 

*' Windsor Forest," the imagery, when not actually 
false, is vague and conventional, and the language 
abounds in classical insipidities, epithets that describe 
nothing, and generalities at second hand from older 
poets, who may once, perhaps, have written with their 
''eyes upon the object." Blushing Flora paints the 
enameled ground; cheerful murmurs fluctuate on the 
gale; Eridanus through flowery meadows strays; 
gay gilded* scenes and shining prospects rise; while 
everywhere are balmy zephyrs, sylvan shades, wind- 
ing vales, vocal shores, silver floods, crystal springs, 
feathered quires, and Phoebus and Philomel and 
Ceres' gifts assist the purple year. It was after this 
fashion that Pope rendered the famous moonlight 
passage in his translation of the Iliad: 

** Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise, 
A flood of glory bursts from all the skies," etc. 

''Strange to think of an enthusiast," says Words- 
worth, "reciting these verses under the cope of a 
moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least 
disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity." The 
poetic diction against which Wordsworth protested 
was an outward sign of the classical preference for 
the general over the concrete. The vocabulary was 
Latinized because, in English, the mof propre is com- 

and the " Seasons " [1667-1726] does not contain a single new image 
of external nature. — Wordsworth^ Appendix to Lyrical Ballads, 
(1815). 

* Gild is a perfect earmark of eighteenth-century descriptive verse : 
the shore is gilded and so are groves, clouds, etc. Contentment gilds, 
the scene, and the stars gild the gloomy night (Parnell) or the glow-j 
ing pole (Pope). 



The zAiigiistans. 59 

monly a Saxon word, while its Latin synonym has a 
convenient indefiniteness that keeps the subject at 
arm's length. Of a similar tendency was the favorite 
rhetorical figure of personification, which gave a false 
air of life to abstractions by the .easy process of spell- 
ing them with a capital letter. Thus: 

" From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, 
Till Declamation roared whilst Passion slept; 
Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread, 
Philosophy remained though Nature fled, . . . 
Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day, 
And Pantomime and Song confirmed her sway." * 

Everything was personified: Britannia, Justice, Lib- 
erty, Science, Melancholy, Night. Even vaccination 
for the smallpox was invoked as a goddess, 

'* Inoculation, heavenly maid, descend ! " f 

But circumlocution or periphrasis was the capital 
means by which the Augustan poet avoided pre- 
cision and attained nobility of style. It enabled him 
to speak of a woman as a "nymph," or a "fair"; of 
sheep as "the fleecy care"; of fishes as " the scaly 
tribe "; and of a picket fence as a " spiculated paling." 
Lowell says of Pope's followers: "As the master had 
made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, so 
the disciples endeavored to escape from what was 
common. This they contrived by the ready expedient 
of the periphrasis. They called everything something 
else. A boot with them was 

'* 'The shining leather that encased the limb.' 

* Johnson, " Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane," 1747. 
f See Coleridge, " Biographia Literaria," chap, xviii. 



6o zA History of English l^manticism. 

Coffee became 

" ' The fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown.' "* 

*'For the direct appeal to Nature, and the naming 
of specific objects," says Mr. Gosse,f "they substi- 
tuted generalities and second-hand allusions. They no 
longer mentioned the gillyflower and the daffodil, but 
permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's 
vernal wreath. It was vulgar to say that the moon was 
rising; the gentlemanly expression was, * Cynthia is 
lifting her silver horn ! ' Women became nymphs in 
this new phraseology, fruits became ' the treasures of 
Pomona,* a horse became 'the impatient courser.' 
The result of coining these conventional counters for 
groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was 
lost in literature. Apples were the treasures of 
Pomona, but so were cherries, too, and if one wished 
to allude to peaches, they also were the treasures 
of Pomona. This decline from particular to general 
language was regarded as a great gain in elegance. 
It was supposed that to use one of these genteel 
counters, which passed for coin of poetic language, 
brought the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity. 
It was thought that the old direct manner of speaking 
was crude and futile; that a romantic poet who wished 
to allude to caterpillars could do so without any exer- 
cise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the word 
'caterpillars,' whereas the classical poet had to prove 
that he was a scholar and a gentleman by inventing 
some circumlocution, such as 'the crawling scourge 

* Essay on Pope, in " My Study Windows." 
f " From Shakespere to Pope," pp. 9-1 1. 



I 



7he zAiigustans. 6i 

that smites the leafy plain.' . . In the generation 
that succeeded Pope really clever writers spoke of a 
* gelid cistern,' when they meant a cold bath, and 'the 
loud hunter-crew' when they meant a pack of fox- 
hounds." 

It would be a mistake to suppose that the men of 
Pope's generation, including Pope himself, were alto- 
gether wanting in romantic feeling. There is a 
marked romantic accent in the Countess of Winchel- 
sea's ode ''To the Nightingale"; in her " Nocturnal 
Reverie"; in Parnell's "Night Piece on Death," and 
in the work of several Scotch poets, like Allan Ram- 
say and Hamilton of Bangour, whose ballad, "The 
Braes of Yarrow," is certainly a strange poem to come 
out of the heart of the eighteenth century. But these 
are eddies and back currents in the stream of literary 
tendency. We are always in danger of forgetting that 
the literature of an age does not express its entire, 
but only its prevailing, spirit. There is commonly 
a latent, silent body of thought and feeling underneath 
which remains inarticulate, or nearly so. It is this 
prevailing spirit and fashion which I have endeavored 
to describe in the present chapter. If the picture 
seems to lack relief, or to be in any way exaggerated, 
the reader should consult the chapters on "Classi- 
cism " and " The Pseudo-Classicists " in M. Pellissier's 
" Literary Movement in France," already several times 
referred to. They describe a literary situation which 
had a very exact counterpart in England. 



CHAPTER III. 
XLbc Spenserians, 

Dissatisfaction with a prevalent mood or fashion 
in literature is apt to express itself either in a fresh 
and independent criticism of life, or in a reversion 
to older types. But, as original creative genius is 
not always forthcoming, a literary revolution com- 
monly begins with imitation. It seeks inspiration in 
the past, and substitutes a new set of models as differ- 
ent as possible from those which it finds currently 
followed. In every country of Europe the classical 
tradition had hidden whatever was most national, 
most individual, in its earlier culture, under a smooth, 
uniform veneer. To break away from modern con- 
vention, England and Germany, and afterward France, 
went back to ancient springs of national life; not 
always, at first, wisely, but in obedience to a true 
instinct. 

How far did any knowledge or love of the old 
romantic literature of England survive among the 
contemporaries of Dryden and Pope? It is not hard 
to furnish an answer to this question. The prefaces 
of Dryden, the critical treatises of Dennis, Winstanley, 
Oldmixon, Rymer, Langbaine, Gildon, Shaftesbury, 
and many others, together with hundreds of passages 
in prologues and epilogues to plays; in periodical 
essays like the Tatler and Spectator; in verse essays 

62 



The Spenserians. 6:^ 

like Roscommon's, Mulgrave's, and Pope's; in prefaces 
to various editions of Shakspere and Spenser; in 
letters, memoirs, etc., supply a mass of testimony to 
the fact that neglect and contempt had, with a few- 
exceptions, overtaken all English writers who wrote 
before the middle of the seventeenth century. The 
exceptions, of course, were those supreme masters 
whose genius prevailed against every change of taste : 
Shakspere and Milton, and, in a less degree, Chaucer 
and Spenser. Of authors strictly mediaeval, Chaucer 
still had readers, and there were reprints of his works 
in 1687, 1721 and 1737,* although no critical edition 
appeared until Tyrwhitt's in 1775-78. It is probable, 
however, that the general reader, if he read Chaucer 
at all, read him in such modernized versions as Dry- 
den's "Fables" and Pope's *' January and May." 
Dryden's preface has some admirable criticism of 
Chaucer, although it is evident, from what he says 
about the old poet's versification, that the secret of 
Middle English scansion and pronunciation had 
already been lost. Prior and Pope, who seem to have 
been attracted chiefly to the looser among the 
" Canterbury Tales," made each a not very success- 
ful experiment at burlesque imitation of Chaucerian 
language. 

Outside of Chaucer, and except among antiquarians 
and professional scholars, there was no remembrance 
of the whole corpus poetarum of the English Middle 
Age: none of the metrical romances, rhymed chroni- 
cles, saints' legends, miracle plays, minstrel ballads, 
verse homilies, manuals of devotion, animal fables, 

*A small portion of the " Canterbury Tales." Edited by Morell. 



64 nA History of English 'Romanticism. 

courtly or popular allegories and love songs of the 
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Nor 
was there any knowledge or care about the master- 
pieces of mediaeval literature in other languages than 
English; about such representative works as the 
*' Nibelungenlied," the ** Chanson de Roland," the 
** Roman de la Rose," the "Parzival" of Wolfram 
von Eschenbach, the ''Tristan " of Gottfried of Stras- 
burg, the ''Arme Heinrich " of Hartmann von Aue, 
the chronicles of Villehardouin, Joinville, and Frois- 
sart, the " Morte Artus," the ''Dies Irse," the lyrics 
of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadour, and of the 
minnesinger Walther von der Vogelweide, the Span- 
ish Romancero, the poems of the Elder Edda, the 
romances of "Amis et Amile " and " Aucassin et 
Nicolete," the writings of Villon, the " De Imitatione 
Christi " ascribed to Thomas a Kempis. Dante was 
a great name and fame, but he was virtually un- 
read. 

There is nothing strange about this; many of these 
things were still in manuscript and in unknown 
tongues, Old Norse, Old French, Middle High Ger- 
man, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin. It would 
be hazardous to assert that the general reader, or 
even the educated reader, of to-day has much more 
acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor 
of the eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance 
than he has with ^schylus, Thucydides, and Lu- 
cretius, at first hand. But it may be confidently 
asserted that he knows much more about them; that 
he thinks them worth knowing about; and that 
through modern, popular versions of them — through 
poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays. 



The Spensertans. 65 

and what not — he has in his mind's eye a picture of 
the Middle Age, perhaps as definite and fascinating as 
the picture of classical antiquity. That he has so is 
owing to the romantic movement. For the significant 
circumstance about the attitude of the last century 
toward the whole mediaeval period was, not its igno- I 
ranee, but its incuriosity. It did not want to hear 
anything about it.* Now and then, hints Pope, an 

* The sixteenth [sic. QiicBre, seventeenth ?] century had an in- 
stinctive repugnance for the crude literature of the Middle Ages, the 
product of so strange and incoherent a civilization. Here classicism 
finds nothing but grossness and barbarism, never suspecting that it 
might contain germs, v^'hich, with time and genius, might develop 
into a poetical growth, doubtless less pure, but certainly more com- 
plex in its harmonies, and of a more expressive form of beauty. The 
history of our ancient poetry, traced in a few lines by Boileau, 
clearly shov/s to what degree he either ignored or misrepresented it. 
The singular, confused architecture of Gothic cathedrals gave those 
who saw beauty in symmetr}' of line and purity of form but further 
evidence of the clumsiness and perverted taste of our ancestors. All 
remembrance of the great poetic works of the Middle Ages is com- 
pletely effaced. No one supposes in those barbarous times the exist- 
ence of ages classical also in their way; no one imagines either their 
heroic songs or romances of adventure, either the rich bounty of 
lyrical styles or the naive, touching crudity of the Christian drama. 
The seventeenth century turned disdainfully away from the monu- 
ments of national genius discovered by it; finding them sometimes 
shocking in their rudeness, sometimes puerile in their refinements. 
These unfortunate exhumations, indeed, only serve to strengthen its 
cult for a simple, correct beauty, the models of which are found in 
Greece and Rome. Why dream of penetrating the darkness of our 
origin? Contemporary society is far too self-satisfied to seek dis- 
traction in the study of a past which it does not comprehend. The 
subjects and heroes of domestic history are also prohibited. Corneille 
is Latin, Racine is Greek; the very name of Childebrande suffices to 
cover an epopee with ridicule. — Pellissur, pp. 7-8. 



66 zA History of English Romanticism. 

antiquarian pedant, a university don, might affect an 
admiration for some obsolete author: 

** Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote, 
And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: 
One likes no language but the ' Faery Queen ' ; 
f A Scot will fight for " ' Christ's Kirk o' the Green.' " * 

But, furthermore, the great body of Elizabethan and 
Stuart literature was already obsolescent. Dramatists 
of the rank of Marlowe and Webster, poets like 
f George Herbert and Robert Herrick — favorites with 
^^ our own generation — prose authors like Sir Thomas 
Browne — from whom Coleridge and Emerson drew 
inspiration — had fallen into *'the portion of weeds and 
outworn faces." Even writers of such recent, almost 
contemporary, repute as Donne, whom Carew had 
styled 

** — a king who ruled, as he thought fit, 
The universal monarchy of wit " : 

or as Cowley, whom Dryden called the darling of his 
youth, and who was esteemed in his own lifetime a 
better poet than Milton; even Donne and Cowley 
^had no longer a following. Pope "versified" some 
of Donne's rugged satires, and Johnson quoted pas- 
sages from him as examples of the bad taste of the 
metaphysical poets. This in the "Life of Cowley," 
with which Johnson began his "Lives of the Poets," 
as though Cowley was the first of the moderns. But, 

" Who now reads Cowley ? " 

• asks Pope in 1737.* The year of the Restoration 
^(i66o) draws a sharp line of demarcation between the 

* " Epistle to Augustus." 



The Spenser ians. 67 

old and the new. In 1675, the year after Milton's 
death, his nephew, Edward Philips, published '' The- 
atrum Poetarum," a sort of biographical dictionary 
of ancient and modern authors. In the preface, hei 
says : ** As for the antiquated and fallen into obscurity 
from their former credit and reputation, they are, for 
the most part, those that have written beyond the 
verge of the present age; for let us look back as far 
as about thirty or forty years, and we shall find a 
profound silence of the poets beyond that time, except 
of some few dramatics." 

This testimony is the more convincing, since Philips 
was something of a laudator teinporis acti. He praises 
several old English poets and sneers at several newy 
ones, such as Cleaveland and Davenant, who were 
high in favor with the royal party. He complains 
that nothing now ''relishes so well as what is written 
in the smooth style of our present language, taken to 
be of late so much refined"; that "we should be so 
compliant with the French custom, as to follow set 
fashions"; that the imitation of Corneille has, 
corrupted the English stage; and that Dryden, 
"complying with the modefied and gallantish humour 
of the time," has, in his heroic plays, " indulged a little 
too much to the French way of continual rime." One 
passage, at least, in Philips' preface has been thought 
to be an echo of Milton's own judgment on the 
pretensions of the new school of poetry. "Wit, 
ingenuity, and learning in verse; even elegancy itself, 
though that comes nearest, are one thing. True 
native poetry is another; in which there is a certain 
air and spirit which perhaps the most learned and 
judicious in other arts do not perfectly apprehend, 



6S cA History of English 1{omanticism. 

much less is it attainable by any study or industry. 
Nay, though all the laws of heroic poem, all the laws 
of tragedy were exactly observed, yet still this tour 
entrejeant — this poetic energy, if I may so call it, 
would be required to give life to all the rest; which 
shines through the roughest, most unpolished, and 
antiquated language, and may haply be wanting in 
the most polite and reformed. Let us observe 
Spenser, with all his rusty, obsolete words, with all 
his rough-hewn clouterly verses; yet take him 
throughout, and we shall find in him a graceful and 

I poetic majesty. In like manner, Shakspere in spite 
of all his unfiled expressions, his rambling and 
indigested fancies — the laughter of the critical — yet 
must be confessed a poet above many that go beyond 
him in literature* some degrees." 
^The laughter of the critical! Let us pause upon the 
phrase, for it is a key to the whole attitude of the 
Augustan mind toward *'our old tragick poet." 
Shakspere was already a national possession. Indeed 
it is only after the Restoration that we find any clear 
recognition of him, as one of the greatest — as perhaps 
himself the very greatest — of the dramatists of all 
time. For it is only after the Restoration that criti- 

■ cism begins. '* Dryden," says Dr. Johnson, **may be 
properly considered as the father of English criticism, 

^as the writer who first taught us to determine, upon 
principles, the merit of composition. . . Dryden's 
* Essay of Dramatic Poesy ' [1667] was the first | 
regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing." f 
The old theater was dead and Shakspere now emerged 

*/. tf., learning. t " Life of Dryden." ; 



The Spenserians. 69 

from amid its ruins, as the one unquestioned legacy 
of the Elizabethan age to the world's literature. He 
was not only the favorite of the people, but in a 
critical time, and a time whose canons of dramatic 
art were opposed to his practice, he united the suf- 
frages of all the authoritative leaders of literary 
opinion. Pope's lines are conclusive as to the vener- 
ation in v/hich Shakspere's memory was held a century 
after his death. 

" On Avon's banks, where flowers eternal blow, 
If I but ask, if any weed can grow ; 
One tragic sentence if I dare deride 
Which Betterton's grave action dignified. . . 
How will our fathers rise up in a rage, 
And swear, all shame is lost in George's age. " * 

The Shaksperian tradition is unbroken in the his- 

;tory of English literature and of the English theater. 

\ His plays, in one form or another, have always kept 

' the stage even in the most degenerate condition of 

public taste, f Few handsomer tributes have been 

* " Epistle to Augustus." 

f The tradition as to Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton is almost 
equally continuous. A course of what Lowell calls "penitential 
reading," in Restoration criticism, will convince anyone that these 
four names already stood out distinctly, as those of the four greatest 
English poets. See especially Winstanley, " Lives of the English 
Poets," 1687; Langbaine, "An Account of the English Dramatic 
Poets," 1691 ; Dennis, " Essay on the Genius and Writings of 
Shakspere," 1712 ; Gildon, "The Complete Art of Poetry," 1718. 
The fact mentioned by Macaulay, that Sir Wm. Temple's " Essay 
on Ancient and Modern Learning " names none of the four, is with- 
out importance. Temple refers by name to only three English 
**wits," Sidney, Bacon, and Selden. This very superficial perform- 
ance of Temple's was a contribution to the futile controversy over the 



70 <tA History of English 'T{omanticism. 

paid to Shakspere's genius than were paid in prose 
and verse, by the critics of our classical age, from 
Dryden to Johnson. *'To begin then with Shaks- 
pere," says the former, in his "Essay of Dramatic 
Poesy," '* he was the man who, of all modern and per- 
\/haps ancient poets, had the largest and most compre- 
hensive soul." And, in the prologue to his adaptation 
of ''The Tempest," he acknowledges that 

" Shakspere's magic could not copied be : 
Within that circle none durst walk but he." 

"The poet of whose works I have undertaken the 
revision," writes Dr. Johnson, "may now begin to 
assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the 
privilege of established fame and prescriptive venera- 
tion." * 

" Each change of many-colored life he drew, 
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new." f 

Yet Dryden made many petulant, and Johnson 
many fatuous mistakes about Shakspere; while such 
minor criticasters as Thomas Rymer X and Mrs. 
Charlotte Lenox § uttered inanities of blasphemy about 
the finest touches in "Macbeth " and "Othello." For 
if we look closer, we notice that everyone who bore 

relative merits of the ancients and moderns, which is now only of 
interest as having given occasion to Bentley to display his great 
scholarship in his " Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris," (1698), 
and to Swift to show his powers of irony in *' The Battle of the 
Books " (1704). 

* Preface to the " Plays of Shakspere," 1765. 

f Prologue, spoken by Garrick at the opening of Drury Lane 
Theater, 1747. 

X" The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered and Examined," 1678. 

§ " Shakspere Illustrated," 1753. 



The Spensermns. 71 

witness to Shakspere's greatness qualified his praise 
by an emphatic disapproval of his methods. He was a 
prodigious genius, but a most defective artist. He was 
the supremest of dramatic poets, but he did not know 
his business. It did not apparently occur to anyone • 
— except, in some degree, to Johnson — that there was 
an absurdity in this contradiction; and that the real 
fault was not in Shakspere, but in the standards by 
which he was tried. Here are the tests which techni- 
cal criticism has always been seeking to impose, and 
they are not confined to the classical period only. 
They are used by Sidney, who took the measure of the 
English buskin before Shakspere had begun to write; 
by Jonson, who measured socks with him in his own 
day ; by Matthew Arnold, who wanted an English Acad- 
emy, but in whom the academic vaccine, after so long a 
transmission, worked but mildly. Shakspere violated* 
the unities; his plays were neither right comedies nor 
right tragedies; he had small Latin and less Greek; 
he wanted art and sometimes sense, committing anach- 
ronisms and Bohemian shipwrecks; wrote hastily, 
did not blot enough, and failed of the grand style. He 
was ''untaught, unpractised in a barbarous age"; a 
wild, irregular child of nature, ignorant of the rules, 
unacquainted with ancient models, succeeding — when 
he did succeed — by happy accident and the sheer force 
of genius; his plays were " roughdrawn," his plots 
lame, his speeches bombastic; he was guilty on every 
page of ''some solecism or some notorious flaw in 



sense. 



* 



Langbaine, to be sure, defends him against Dryden's 

*See Dryden's " Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy " and " Defence 
of the Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada." 



72 zA History of English ^manticism. 

censure. But Dennis regrets his ignorance of poetic 
art and the disadvantages under which he lay from not 
being conversant with the ancients. If he had known 
.his Sallust, he would have drawn a juster picture of 
\c^sar; and if he had read Horace "Ad Pisones," he 
would have made a better Achilles. He complains 
that he makes the good and the bad perish promiscu- 
Nously; and that in '' Coriolanus " — a play which 
Dennis ** improved " for the new stage — he represents 
Menenius as a buffoon and introduces the rabble in a 
most undignified fashion.* ^ildon, again, says that 
Shakspere must have read Sidney's ** Defence of 
Poesy" and therefore, ought to have known the rules 
and that his neglect of them was owing to laziness. 
*' Money seems to have been his aim more than reputa- 
\ tion, and therefore he was always in a hurry . . . 
and he thought it time thrown away, to study regu- 
larity and order, when any confused stuff that came 
into his head would do his business and fill his house. " f 
It would be easy, but it would be tedious, to 
multiply proofs of this patronizing attitude toward 
Shakspere. Perhaps Pope voices the general senti- 
ment of his school, as fairly as anyone, in the 
last words of his preface. J; *'I will conclude 
by saying of Shakspere that, with all his faults 
and with all the irregularity of his draina^ one may 

* "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712. 
f "The Art of Poetry," pp. 63 and 99. Cf. Pope, " Epistle to 
Augustus " : 

* ' Shakspere (whom you and every play-house bill 
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) 
For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight, 
And grew immortal in his own despite." 
:j: Pope's "Shakspere," 1725. 



The Spenser tans. 73 

look upon his works, in comparison of those that 
are more finished and regular, as upon an ancient, 
majestic piece of Gothic architecture compared with a 
neat, modern building. The latter is more elegant 
and glaring, but the former is more strong and 
solemn. . . It has much the greater variety, and 
much the nobler apartments, though we are often con- 
ducted to them by dark, odd and uncouth passages. 
Nor does the whole fail to strike us with greater rev-/ 
erence, though many of the parts are childish, ill- 
placed and unequal to its grandeur." This viev/ of 
Shakspere continued to be the rule until Coleridge and 
Schlegel taught the new century that this child of 
fancy was, in reality, a profound and subtle artist, but 
that the principles of his art — as is always the case with 
creative genius working freely and instinctively — were 
learned by practice, in the concrete, instead of b eing 
consciously thrown out by the workman himself into 
an abstract theoria; so that they have to be dis- 
covered by a reverent study of his work and lie deeper 
than the rules of French criticism. Schlegel, whose 
lectures on dramatic art were^translated into English 
in 1815, speaks with indignation of the current 
English misunderstanding of Shakspere. "That 
foreigners, and Frenchmen in particular, who fre 
quently speak in the strangest language about antiq- 
uity and the Middle Age, as if cannibalism had been 
first put an end to in Europe by Louis XIV., should 
entertain this opinion of Shakspere might be pardon- 
able. But that Englishmen should adopt such a ca- 
lumniation . . . is to me incomprehensible."* 

* For a fuller discussion of this subject, consult " A History of 
Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere," in the supplemental volume 



\) 



74 ^ History of English l^omanticism. 

The beginnings of the romantic movement in Eng- 
land were uncertain. There was a vague dissent 
from current literary estimates, a vague discontent 
with reigning literary modes, especially with the 
merely intellectual poetry then in vogue, which did 

of Knight's Pictorial Edition. Editions of Shakspere issued within 
the century following the Restoration were the third Folio, 1664 ; the 
fourth Folio, 1685; Rowe's (the first critical edition, with a Life, etc.) 
1709 (second edition, 1714) ; Pope's, 1725 (second edition, 1728); 
Theobald's, 1733 I Hanmer's 1744 ; Warburton-Pope's, 1747 ; and 
Johnson's, 1 765. Meanwhile, though Shakspere's plays continued to 
be acted, it was mostly in doctored versions. Tate changed " Lear" 
to a comedy. Davenant and Dryden made over " The Tempest " into 
"The Enchanted Island," turning blank verse into rhyme and intro- 
ducing new characters, while Shad well altered it into an opera. 
Dryden rewrote " Troilus and Cressida"; Davenant, ** Macbeth." 
Davenant patched together a thing which he called " The 
Law against Lovers," from "Measure for Measure" and "Much 
Ado about Nothing." Dennis remodeled the "Merry Wives 
of Windsor" as " The Comical Gallant"; Tate, "Richard IL" 
as "The Sicilian Usurper"; and Otway, "Romeo and Juliet," 
as " Caius Marius." Lord Lansdowne converted " The Merchant 
of Venice" into "The Jew of Venice," wherein Shylock 
was played as a comic character down to the time of Mack- 
lin and Kean. Durfey tinkered " Cymbeline." Gibber meta- 
morphosed " King John " into "Papal Tyranny," and his version 
was acted till Macready's time. Gibber's stage version of " Rich- 
ard III." is played still. Cumberland "engrafted" new features 
upon " Timon of Athens " for Garrick's theater, about 1775. In his 
life of Mrs. Siddons, Campbell says that " Coriolanus " " was never 
acted genuinely from the year 1660 till the year 1820 " (Phillimore's 
" Life of Lyttelton," Vol. I. p. 315). He mentions a revision by 
Tate, another by Dennis (" The Invader of his Country "), and a third 
brought out by the elder Sheridan in 1764, atCovent Garden, and put 
together from Shakspere's tragedy and an independent play of the 
same name by Thomson. " Then in 1789 came the Kemble edition 
in which . . . much of Thomson's absurdity is still preserved." 



The Spensertans, 75 

not feed the soul. But there was, at first, no con- 
scious, concerted effort toward something better; 
still less was there any sudden outburst of creative 
activity. The new group of poets, partly contem- 
poraries of Pope, partly successors to him — Thomson, ^ 
Shenstone, Dyer, Akenside, Gray, Collins, and the 
Warton brothers — found their point of departure | 
in the loving study and Revival of old author^ 
From what has been said of the survival of Shaks- 
pere's influence it might be expected that his would 
have been the name paramount among the pioneers of 
English romanticism. There are several reasons why 
this was not the case. 

In the first place, ■'the genius of the new poets was* 
lyrical or descriptive, rather than dramatic. The' 
divorce between literature and the stage had not yet, 
indeed, become total; and, in obedience to the ex- 
pectation that every man of letters should try his 
hand at play-writing, Thomson, at least, as well as his 
friend and disciple Mallet, composed a number of 
dramas. But these were little better than failures 
even at the time; and while **The Seasons" has 
outlived all changes of taste, and '*The Castle of 
Indolence " has never wanted admirers, tragedies like 
''Agamemnon" and " Sophinisba " have been long 
forgotten. An imitation of Shakspere to any effect- 
ive purpose must obviously have taken the shape of 
a play; and neither Gray nor Collins nor Akenside, 
nor any of the group, was capable of a play. Inspira- 
tion of a kind, these early romanticists did draw from 
Shakspere. Verbal reminiscences of him abound in 
Gray. Collins was a diligent student of his works. 
His ** Dirge in Cymbeline " is an exquisite variation 



7 



76 <iA History of English 1{omanticism. 

on a Shaksperian theme. In the delirium of his last 

sickness, he told Warton that he had found in an 

Italian novel the long-sought original of the plot of 

*'The Tempest." It is noteworthy, by the way, that 

the romanticists were attracted to the poetic, as 

, distinguished from the dramatic, aspect of Shaks- 

pere's genius; to those of his plays in which fairy lore 

\ and supernatural machinery occur, such as "The 

VTempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." 

Again, the stage has a history of its own, and, in 
so far as it was now making progress of any kind, it 
was not in the direction of a more poetic or romantic 
.drama, but rather toward prose tragedy and the senti- 
Imental comedy of domestic life, what the French call 
ua tragedie bourgeoise and la coniedie larmoyante. In 
truth the theater was now dying; and, though, in the 
comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan, it sent up one 
bright, expiring gleam, the really dramatic talent of 
the century had already sought other channels in the 
novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. 

After all, a good enough reason why the romantic 
movement did not begin with imitation of Shakspere 
is the fact that Shakspere is inimitable. He has no 
one manner that can be caught, but a hundred 

(manners; is not the poet of romance, but of human- 
ity; nor mediaeval, but perpetually modern and con- 
temporaneous in his universality. The very familiar- 
ity of his plays, and their continuous performance, 
although in mangled forms, was a reason why they 
could take little part in a literary revival; for what 
has never been forgotten cannot be revived. To 
Germany and France, at a later date, Shakspere 
came with the shock of a discovery and begot Schiller 



The Spenserians. 77 

and Victor Hugo. In the England of the eighteenth 
century he begot only Ireland's forgeries. 

The name inscribed in large letters on the standard 
of the new school was not Shakspere but Spenser. If 
there is any poet who is par excellence the poet of 
romance, whose art is the antithesis of Pope's, it is\ 
the poet of the *' Faerie Queene." To ears that had^ 
heard from childhood the tinkle of the couplet, with its 
monotonously recurring rhyme, its inevitable caesura, 
its narrow imprisonment of the sense, it must have 
been a relief to turn to the amplitude of Spenser's 
stanza, **the full strong sail of his great verse." To 
a generation surfeited with Pope's rhetorical devices 
— antithesis, climax, anticlimax — and fatigued with the 
unrelaxing brilliancy and compression of his language; 
the escape from epigram and point (snap after snap,* 
like a pack of fire-crackers), from a style which has made 
his every other line a proverb or current quotation — 
the escape from all this into Spenser's serene, leisurely 
manner, copious Homeric similes, and lingering detail 
must have seemed most restful. To go from Pope to 
Spenser was to exchange platitudes, packed away 
with great verbal cunning in neat formulas readily 
portable by the memory, for a wealth of concrete 
images: to exchange saws like, -.^ 

" A little learning is a dangerous thing," 

for a succession of richly colored pictures by the) 
greatest painter among English poets. It was toi 
exchange the most prosaic of our poets — a poet about 
whom question has arisen whether he is a poet at all 
— for the most purely poetic of our poets, " the poet's 
poet." And finally, it was to exchange the world of 



78 ^ History of English '^m antic ism. 

everyday manners and artificial society for an imagi- 
nary kingdom of enchantment, " out of space, out of 
time." 

English poetry has oscillated between the poles of 
Spenser and Pope. The poets who have been ac- 
cepted by the race as most truly national, poets like 
Shakspere, Milton, and Byron, have stood midway. 

j Neither Spenser nor Pope satisfies long. We weary, 
in time, of the absence of passion and intensity in 
iSpenser, his lack of dramatic power, the want of 
actuality in his picture of life, the want of brief 
energy and nerve in his style; just as we weary of 

jPope's inadequate sense of beauty. But at a time 

'when English poetry had abandoned its true function — 
the refreshment and elevation of the soul through the 
imagination — Spenser's poetry, the poetry of ideal 
beauty, formed the most natural corrective. What- 
ever its deficiencies, it was not, at any rate, ''con- 
ceived and composed in his wits." 

Spenser had not fared so well as Shakspere under 
the change which came over public taste after the 
Restoration. The age of Elizabeth had no literary 
reviews or book notices, and its critical remains are of 
the scantiest. But the complimentary verses by many 
hands published with the '' Faerie Queene " and the 
numerous references to Spenser in the whole poetic 
literature of the time, leave no doubt as to the 
^ fact that his contemporaries accorded him the fore- 
most place among English poets. The tradition of 
his supremacy lasted certainly to the middle of the 
seventeenth century, if not beyond. His influence is 
visible not only in the work of professed disciples like 

\ Giles and Phineas Fletcher, the pastoral poet William 



\ 



The Spenserians. 79 

Browne, and Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, 
but in the verse of Jonson, Fletcher, Milton, and 
many others. Milton confessed to Dryden that SpenA 
ser was his *' poetical father." Dryden himself and* 
Cowley, whose practice is so remote from Spenser's, 
acknowledged their debt to him. The passage from 
Cowley's essay "On Myself" is familiar: "I remem- 
ber when I began to read, and to take some pleasure 
in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I 
know not by what accident, for she herself never read 
any book but of devotion — but there was wont to lie) 
Spenser's works. This I happened to fall upon, and 
A^as infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights 
ind giants and monsters and brave houses which I 
'ound everywhere there (though my understanding 
lad little to do with all this), and, by degrees, with 
:he tinkling of the rime and dance of the numbers; so 
:hat I think I had read him all over before I was twelve 
i^ears old, and was thus made a poet as irremediably 
IS a child is made an eunuch." It is a commonplace 
;hat Spenser has made more poets than any other one ( 
vriter. Even Pope, whose empire he came back from 
fairyland to overthrow, assured Spence that he had 
•ead the '* Faerie Queene " with delight when he was 
L boy, and re-read it with equal pleasure in his last 
^ears. Indeed, it is too readily assumed that writers 
ire insensible to the beauties of an opposite school. 
?ope was quite incapable of making romantic poetry, \ 
)ut not, therefore, incapable of appreciating it. He 
00k a great liking to Allan Ramsay's '' Gentle Shep- 
lerd"; he admired ''The Seasons," and did Thomson 
he honor to insert a few lines of his own in '* Sum- 
ner." Among his youthful parodies of old English 



8o zA History of English %omanticisin. 

poets is one piece entitled ''The Alley," a not over 
clever burlesque of the famous description of the 
Bower of Bliss.* 

As for Dryden, his reverence for Spenser is quali- 
fied by the same sort of critical disapprobation which 
we noticed in his eulogies of Shakspere. He says 
that the " Faerie Queene " has no uniformity: the lan- 
guage is not so obsolete as is commonly supposed, and 
is intelligible after some practice; but the choice of 
stanza is unfortunate, though in spite of it, Spenser's 
verse is more melodious than any other English poet's 
except Mr. Waller's, f Ambrose Philips — Namby 
Pamby Philips — whom Thackeray calls "a dreary 
idyllic cockney," appealed to '' The Shepherd's Calen- 
dar" as his model, in the introduction to his insipid 
''Pastorals," 1709. Steele, in No. 540 of the Spec- 
tator (November 19, 17 12), printed some mildly com- 
mendatory remarks about Spenser. Altogether it is 
clear that Spenser's greatness was accepted, rather 
upon trust, throughout the classical period, but that 
this belief was coupled with a general indifference to 
his writings. Addison's lines in his "Epistle to 
Sacheverel; An Account of the Greatest English 
Poets," 1694, probably represent accurately enough 
the opinion of the majority of readers: 

" Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage, 
In ancient tales amused a barbarous age; 
An age that, yet uncultivate and rude, 
Where'er the poet's fancy led, pursued, 
Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods, 
To dens of dragons and enchanted woods. 

* " Faerie Queene," II. xii. 71. 

f " Essay on Satire." Philips says a good word for the Spenserian 
stanza: " How much more stately and majestic in epic poems, espe- 



The Spenser ians. 8i 

But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore, 
Can charm an understanding age no more. 
The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, 
While the dull moral lies too plain below. 
We view well pleased at distance all the sights 
Of arms and palfreys, battles, fields and fights, 
And damsels in distress and courteous knights, 
But when we look too near, the shades decay 
And all the pleasing landscape fades away." 

Addison acknowledged to Spence that, when he 
wrote this passage, he had never read Spenser! As 
late as 1754 Thomas Warton speaks of him as '' this 
admired but neglected poet," * and Mr. Kitchin asserts 
that ** between 1650 and 1750 there are but few no- 
tices of him, and very few editions of his works." f 
There was a reprint of Spenser's works — being the 
third folio of the '' Faerie Queene " — in 1679, but no 
critical edition till 17 15. Meanwhile the title of a 
book issued in 1687 shows that Spenser did not escape 
that process of_Jj, improvement " which we have seen 
applied to Shakspere?'' Spenser Redivivus; contain- 
ing the First Book of the 'Faery Queene.' His Es- 
sential Design Preserved, but his Obsolete Language 
and Manner of Verse totally laid aside. Delivered 
in Heroic Numbers by a Person of Quality." The 
preface praises Spenser, but declares that ''his style 
seems no less unintelligible at this day than the obso- 

cially of heroic argument, Spenser's stanza ... is above the way 
either of couplet or alternation of four verses only, I am persuaded, 
were it revived, would soon be acknowledged." — Theatrum Poetata- 
rum. Preface, pp. 3-4. 

*" Observations on the Faery Queene," Vol. II. p. 317. 

f " The Faery Queene," Book I., Oxford, 1869. Introduction, 

p. XX. 



82 c^ History of English Romanticism, 

letest of our English or Saxon dialect." One instance 
of this deliverance into heroic numbers must suffice: 

" By this the northern wagoner had set 

His sevenfold team behind the steadfast star 
That was in ocean waves yet never wet, 
But firm is fixed, and sendeth light from far 
To all that in the wide deep wandering are." 

— Spenser.'*' 

In 17 15 John Hughes published his edition of 
Spenser's works in six volumes. This was the first 
attempt at a critical text of the poet, and was accom- 
panied with a biography, a glossary, an essay on alle- 
gorical poetry, and some remarks on the '' Faerie 
Queene." It is curious to find in the engravings, from 
designs by Du Guernier, which illustrate Hughes' 
volumes, that Spenser's knights wore the helmets and 
body armor of the Roman legionaries, over which is 
occasionally thrown something that looks very much 
like a toga. The lists in which they run a tilt have the 
fagade of a Greek temple for a background. The 
house of Busyrane is Louis Quatorze architecture, and 
Amoret is chained to a renaissance column with 
Corinthian capital and classical draperies. Hughes' 
glossary of obsolete terms includes words which are in 
daily use by modern writers: aghast, baleful, behest, 
bootless, carol, craven, dreary, forlorn, foray, guer- 
don, plight, welkin, yore. If words like these, and 
like many which Warton annotates in his " Observa- 
tions," really needed explanation, it is a striking 

* " Canto " ii. stanza i. 

' ' Now had Bootes' team far passed behind 
The northern star, when hours of night declined." 

— Person of Quality. 



7he Spenserians, 83 

proof, not only of the degree in which our older poets 
had been forgotten, but also of the poverty to which 
the vocabulary of English poetry had been reduced by 
1700. 

In his prefatory remarks to the "Faerie Queene," the 
editor expresses the customary regrets that the poet 
should have chosen so defective a stanza, *' so romantick 
a story," and a model, or framework for the whole, 
which appears so monstrous when *' examined by the 
rules of epick poetry "; makes the hackneyed compari- 
son between Spenser's work and Gothic architecture, 
and apologizes for his author, on the ground that, at 
the time when he wrote, '*the remains of the old 
Gothick chivalry were not quite abolished." ** He did 
not much revive the curiosity of the public," says 
Johnson, in his life of Hughes; "for near thirty years 
elapsed before his edition was reprinted." Editions 
3f the " Faerie Queene " came thick and fast about the 
middle of the century. One (by Birch) was issued in 
1751, and three in 1758; including the important 
edition by Upton, who, of all Spenser's commentators, 
las entered most elaborately into the interpretation of 
:he allegory. 

In the interval had appeared, in gradually increas- 
ng numbers, that series of Spenserian imitations 
vhich forms an interesting department of eighteenth- 
:entury verse. The series was begun by a most 
mlikely person, Matthew Prior, whose " Ode to the 
Jueen," 1706, was in a ten-lined modification of Spen- 
er's stanza and employed a few archaisms like weet 
.nd ween^ but was very unspenserian in manner. As 
:arly as the second decade of the century, the horns 
>f Elfland may be heard faintly blowing in the poems 



84 c^ History of English '^manticism, 

of the Rev. Samuel Croxall, the translator of ^sop's 
" Fables." Mr. Gosse * quotes Croxall's own description 
of his poetry, as designed ** to set off the dry and insipid 
stuff " of the age with '' a whole piece of rich and glow- 
ing scarlet." His two pieces '' The Vision," 1715, and 
**The Fair Circassian," 1720, though written in the 
couplet, exhibit a rosiness of color and a luxuriance of 
imagery manifestly learned from Spenser. In 17 13 he 
had published, under the pseudonym of Nestor Iron- 
side, **An Original Canto of Spenser," and in 1714 
''Another Original Canto," both, of course, in the 
stanza of the "Faerie Queene." The example thus set 
was followed before the end of the century by scores of 
poets, including many well-known names, like Aken- 
side, Thomson, Shenstone, and Thomas Warton, as well 
as many second-rate and third-rate versifiers, f 

* " Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 139. 

f For a full discussion of this subject the reader should consuli 
Phelps' " Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement," chap, 
iv., "The Spenserian Revival." A partial list of Spenseriar 
imitations is given in Todd's edition of Spenser, Vol. I. But the lis 
in Prof. Phelps' Appendix, if not exhaustive, is certainly the mos 
complete yet published and may be here reproduced. 1706 : Prior 
"Ode to the Queen," 1713-21 : Prior (?) : " Colin's Mistakes.' 
1713 : Croxall: "An Original Canto of Spenser." 1714 : Croxall 
" Another Original Canto." i'] 2)0 {circa) : Whitehead: "Vision ol 
Solomon," "Ode to the Honorable Charles Townsend," " Od| 
to the Same." 1736 : Thompson ; " Epithalamium." 1736 
Cambridge: "Marriage of Frederick." 1736-37: Boyse : " Th« 
Olive," " Psalm XLII." 1737 : Akenside : "The Virtuoso." 1739 
West : "Abuse of Traveling." 1739 : Anon.: "A New Canto o 
Spenser's Fairy Queen." 1740 : Boyse : " Ode to the Marquis o 
Tavistock." 1741 {circa) : Boyse : "Vision of Patience." 1742 
Shenstone : " The Schoolmistress." 1742-50 : Cambridge 
*' Archimage." 1742: Dodsley : "Pain and Patience." 1743 



The Spenser ians. 85 

It is noteworthy that many, if not most, of the imita- 
tions were at first undertaken in a spirit of burlesque; 
as is plain not only from the poems themselves, but 
from the correspondence of Shenstone and others.* 
The antiquated speech of an old author is in itself a 
challenge to the parodist: teste our modern ballad imi- 
tations. There is something ludicrous about the very 
look of antique spelling, and in the sound of words like 
'ftsoones 3.^6. perdyj while the sign. Ye Olde Booke Store, 
n Old English text over a bookseller's door, strikes 
;he public invariably as a most merry conceited jest; 
especially if the first letter be pronounced as a y, 

^non. : "Albion's Triumph." 1744 {circa): Dodsley : "Death of 

^r. Pope." 1744: Akenside : ** Ode to Curio." 1746: Blacklock: 

'Hymn to Divine Love," " Philantheus." 1747: Mason: Stanzas 

1 " Musaeus." 1747 : Ridley : " Psyche." 1747 : Lowth : " Choice 

f Hercules." 1747 : Upton : "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy 

)ueen." 1747 : Bedingfield : " Education of Achilles." 1747 : 

'itt: "The Jordan." 1748: T. Warton, Sr. : "Philander." 

748: Thomson: "The Castle of Indolence." 1749: Potter: 

■ A Farewell Hymn to the Country." 1750 : T, Warton : " Morn- 

|ig." 1751 : West: "Education." 1751 : T. Warton : " Elegy on 

le Death of Prince Frederick." 1751 : Mendez : " The Seasons." 

751: Lloyd: "Progress of Envy." 1751 : Akenside: "Ode." 

751: Smith: "Thales." 1753: T. Warton : "A Pastoral in the 

lanner of Spenser." 1754: Denton: "Immortality." 1755: 

mold : " The Mirror." 1748-58 : Mendez : " Squire of Dames." 

756 : Smart : " Hymn to the Supreme Being." 1757 : Thompson : 

The Nativity," " Hymn to May." 1758 : Akenside : "To Country 

entlemen of England." 1759: Wilkie : "A Dream." 1759: Poem 

. " Ralph's Miscellany." 1762 : Denton : " House of Superstition.'' 

767: Mickle : "The Concubine." 1768: Downman : "Land of 

e Muses." 1771-74: Beattie : "The Ministrel." 1775: Anon.: 

Land of Liberty." 1775 : Mickle : Stanzas from " Introduction 

the Lusiad." 

* See Phelps, pp. 66-68. 



86 c/f History of English %omanticism. 

instead of, what it really is, a mere abbreviation of fk. 
But in order that this may be so, the language 
travestied should not be too old. There would be 
nothing amusing, for example, in a burlesque imitation 
of Beowulf, because the Anglo-Saxon of the original 
is utterly strange to the modern reader. It is conceiv- 
able that quick-witted Athenians of the time of Aris- 
tophanes might find something quaint in Homer's Ionic 
dialect, akin to that quaintness which we find in 
Chaucer; but a Grecian of to-day would need to be very 
Attic indeed, to detect any provocation to mirth in 
the use of the genitive in-oto, in place of the genitive 
in-ov. Again, as one becomes familiar with an old 
author, he ceases to be conscious of his archaism: 
the final e in Chaucer no longer strikes him as funny, 
nor even the circumstance that he speaks of little 
birds as smale fowles. And so it happened, that poets 
in the eighteenth century who began with burlesque 
imitation of the *' Faerie Queene " soon fell in love with 
its serious beauties. 

The only poems in this series that have gained per- 
manent footing in the literature are Shenstone's* 
"Schoolmistress" and Thomson's ** Castle of Indo- 
lence." But a brief review of several other members 
of the group will be advisable. Two of them were 
written at Oxford in honor of the marriage of Fred- 
erick, Prince of Wales in 1736 : one by Richard Oweni 
Cambridge;* the other by William Thompson, them 
bachelor of arts and afterward fellow of Queen's Col- 
lege. Prince Fred, it will be remembered, was a» 

*See the sumptuous edition of Cambridge's " Works," issued byv 
his son in 1803. 



The Spenser ians. 87 

somewhat flamboyant figure in the literary and per- 
sonal gossip of his day. He quarreled with his father, 
George 11. , who '' hated boetry and bainting," and who 
was ironically fed with soft dedication by Pope in his 
** Epistle to Augustus "; also with his father's prime 
minister, Sir Robert Walpole, '*Bob, the poet's foe." 
He left the court in dudgeon and set up an opposition 
court of his own where he rallied about him men of 
letters, who had fallen into a neglect that contrasted 
strangely with their former importance in the reign of 
Queen Anne. Frederick's chief ally in this policy was 
his secretary, George Lord Lyttelton, the elegant if 
somewhat amateurish author of *' Dialogues of the 
Dead" and other works; the friend of Fielding, the 
neighbor of Shenstone at Hagley, and the patron of 
Thomson, for whom he obtained the sinecure post of 
Surveyor of the Leeward Islands. 

Cambridge's spousal verses were in a ten-lined 
stanza. His ^' Archimage," written in the strict 
Spenserian stanza, illustrates the frequent employment 
of this form in occasional pieces of a humorous inten- 
tion. It describes a domestic boating party on the 
Thames, one of the oarsmen being a family servant 
and barber-surgeon, who used to dress the chaplain's 
hair: 

" Als would the blood of ancient beadsman spill, 
Whose hairy scalps he hanged in a row 
Around his cave, sad sight to Christian eyes, I trow." 

Thompson's experiments, on the contrary, were) 
quite serious. He had genuine poetic feeling, but lit- 1 
tie talent. In trying to reproduce Spenser's richness 
of imagery and the soft modulation of his verse, he 
succeeds only in becoming tediously ornate. His 



88 zA History of English T^manticism. 

stanzas are nerveless, though not unmusical. His 
college exercise, "The Nativity," 1736, is a Christmas 
vision which comes to the shepherd boy Thomalin, as 
he is piping on the banks of Isis. It employs the pas- 
toral machinery, includes a masque of virtues, — Faith, 
Hope, Mercy, etc., — and closes with a compliment to 
Pope's ** Messiah." The preface to his ''Hymn to 
May," has some bearing upon our inquiries: **As 
Spenser is the most descriptive and florid of all our 
English writers, I attempted to imitate his manner in 
/ the following vernal poem. I have been very sparing 
of the antiquated words which are too frequent in most 
of the imitations of this author. . . His lines are 
most musically sweet, and his descriptions most deli- 
cately abundant, even to a wantonness of painting, but 
still it is the music and painting of nature. We find 
no ambitious ornaments or epigrammatical turns in his 
writings, but a beautiful simplicity which pleases far 
above the glitter of pointed wit." The "Hymn to 
May" is in the seven-lined stanza of Phineas Fletcher's 
"Purple Island"; a poem, says Thompson, "scarce 
heard of in this age, yet the best in the allegorical way 
(next to ' The Fairy Queen ') in the English lan- 
guage." 

William Wilkie, a Scotch minister and professor, of 
eccentric habits and untidy appearance, published, in 
1759, "A Dream: in the Manner of Spenser," which 
may be mentioned here not for its own sake, but for 
the evidence that it affords of a growing impatience 
of classical restraints. The piece was a pendant to 
Wilkie's epic, the "Epigoniad." Walking by the 
Tweed, the poet falls asleep and has a vision of Homer, 
who reproaches him with, the bareness of style in his 



The Spenserians. 89 

*' Epigoniad." The dreamer puts the blame upon the 
critics, 

" Who tie the muses to such rigid laws 

That all their songs are frivolous and poor." 

Shakspere, indeed, 

" Broke all the cobweb limits fixed by fools" ; 

but the only reward of his boldness 

'^ Is that our dull, degenerate age of lead 
Says that he wrote by chance, and that he scarce could read." 

One of the earlier Spenserians was Gilbert West,\ 
the translator of Pindar, who published, in 1739, '' ^q 
the Abuse of Travelling: A Canto in Imitation of 
Spenser."* Another imitation, ''Education," ap- 
peared in 175 1. West was a very tame poet, and the 
only quality of Spenser's which he succeeded in catch- 
ing was his proHj^ty. He used the allegorical ma- 
chinery of the '' Faerie Queene " for moral and mildly 
satirical ends. Thus, in " The Abuse of Travelling," 

* " Mr. Walpole and I have frequently wondered you should never 
mention a certain imitation of Spenser, published last year by a name- 
sake of yours, with which we are all enraptured and enmarveiled." — 
Letter from Gray to Richard West, Florence, July i6, 1740. There 
was no relationship between Gilbert West and Gray's Eton friend, 
though it seems that the former was also an Etonian, and was after- 
wards at Oxford, " whence he was seduced to a more airy mode of 

\ life," says Dr. Johnson, " by a commission in a troop of horse, pro- 

I cured him by his uncle," Cambridge, however, was an acquaintance 
of Gray, Walpole, and Richard West, at Eton. Gray's solitary son- 

! net was composed upon the death of Richard West in 1742 ; and it 
is worth noting that in the introduction to Cambridge's works are a 

1 number of sonnets by his friend Thomas Edwards, himself a Spenser 
lover, whose ' ' sugared sonnets among his private friends " begin 
about 1750 and reach the number of fifty. 



90 <iA History of English Romanticism. ', 

the Red Cross Knight is induced by Archimago to em- 
bark in a painted boat steered by Curiosity, which 
wafts him over to a foreign shore where he is enter- 
tained by a bevy of light damsels whose leader '* hight 
Politessa," and whose blandishments the knight resists. 
Thence he is conducted to a stately castle (the court 
of Louis XV. whose minister — perhaps Cardinal 
Fleury? — is *'an old and runkled mage"); and finally 
to Rome, where a lady yclept Vertii holds court in the 
ruins of the Colosseum, among mimes, fiddlers, pipers, 
eunuchs, painters, and ciceroni. 

Similarly the canto on "Education" narrates how 
a fairy knight, while conducting his young son to the 
house of Paidia, encounters the giant Custom and 
worsts him in single combat. There is some humor 
in the description of the stream of science into which 
the crowd of infant learners are unwillingly plunged, 
and upon whose margin stands 

" A birchen grove that, waving from the shore, 
Aye cast upon the tide its falling bud 
And with its bitter juice empoisoned all the flood." 

The piece is a tedious arraingment of the pedantic " 
methods of instruction in English schools and colleges. 
A passage satirizing the artificial style of gardening 
will be cited later. West had a country-house at 
Wickham, in Kent, where, says Johnson,* **he was 
very often visited by Lyttelton and Pitt; who, when 
they were weary of faction and debates, used at 
Wickham to find books and quiet, a decent table and 
literary conversation. There is at Wickham a walk 
made by Pitt." Like many contemporary poets, West 
interested himself in landscape gardening, and some 
*" Life of West." 



The Spenserians. 91 

of his shorter pieces belong to that literature of in- 
scriptions to which Lyttelton, Akenside, ShenstoneA 
Mason, and others contributed so profusely. It may* 
be said for his Spenserian imitations that their archa- 
isms are unusually correct* — if that be any praise — a 
feature which perhaps recommended them to Gray, 
whose scholarship in this, as in all points, was nicely 
accurate. The obligation to be properly ''obsolete" 
in vocabulary was one that rested heavily on the con- 
sciences of most of these Spenserian imitators. " The 
Squire of Dames," for instance, by the wealthy Jew, 
Moses Mendez, fairly bristles with seld-seen costly 
words, like benty^ frannio7t^ etc., which it would have 
puzzled Spenser himself to^plain. 

One of the pleasantest outcomes of this literary 
fas.iion was William Shenstone's ''Schoolmistress," 
published in an unfinished shape in 1737 and, as 
finally completed, in 1742. This is an affectionate 
half-humorous description of the little dame-school of 
Shenstone's — and of everybody's — native village, and 
has the true idyllic touch. Goldsmith evidently had 
it in memory when he drew the picture of the school 
in his "Deserted Village." f The application to so 

* Lloyd, in " The Progress of Envy," defines wimpled as " hung 
down " ; and Akenside, in " The Virtuoso," employs the ending en 
for the singular verb ! . 

f C/". " And as they looked, they found their horror grew." 

— Shenstone. 
" And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew." 

— Goldsmith. 
" The noises intermixed, which thence resound, 
Do learning's little tenement betray." 

— Shenstone, 
'* There in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule," etc. 

— Goldsmith. 



^2 ^ History of English Romanticism. 

humble a theme of Spenser's stately verse and grave, 
ancient words gives a very quaint effect. The humor 
of ''The Schoolmistress" is genuine, not dependent 
on the mere burlesque, as in Pope's and Cambridge's 
experiments; and it is warmed with a certain tender- 
ness, as in the incident of the hen with her brood of 
chickens, entering the open door of the schoolhouse 
in search of crumbs, and of the grief of the little 
sister who witnesses her brother's flogging, and of the 
tremors of the urchins who have been playing in the 
dame's absence: 

" Forewarned, if little bird their pranks behold, 
'Twill whisper in her ear and all the scene unfold." 

But the only one among the professed scholars of 
Spenser who caught the glow and splendor of the 

^^^Tfriaster was James Thomson. It is the privilege of 
genius to be original even in its imitations. Thom- 
son took shape and hue from Spenser, but added 
something of his own, and the result has a value quite 
independent of its success as a reproduction. '' The 
Castle of Indole nce," 1748,* is a fine poem; at least 
the first part of it is, for the second book is tiresomely 
allegorical, and somewhat involved in plot. There is 

Xa magic art in the description of the *' land of drowsy- 
head," with its ''listless climate" always " atween 
June and May,"f its "stockdove's plaint amid the 
forest deep," its hillside woods of solemn pines, its 
gay castles in the summer clouds, and its murmur of 

* The poem was projected, and perhaps partly written, fourteen 
or fifteen years earlier. 

f Cf, Tennyson's " land in which it seemed always afternoon." — 
TAe Lotus Eaters. 



The Spensenans. 93 

the distant main. The nucleus of Thomson's concep- 
tion is to be found in Spenser's House of Morpheus 
C Faerie Queene," book i. canto i. 41), and his 
Country of Idlesse is itself an anticipation of 
Tennyson's Lotus Land, but verse like this was 
something new in the poetry of the eighteenth 
century: 

" Was nought around but images of rest: 
Sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns between ; 
And flowery beds that slumbrous influence kest, 
From poppies breathed; and beds of pleasant green, 
Where never yet was creeping creature seen. 
Meantime unnumbered glittering streamlets played 
And hurled everywhere their waters sheen ; 
That, as they bickered through the sunny glade, 
Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made." 

^'The Castle of Indolence" had the romantic 
iridescence, the "atmosphere" which is lacking to 
the sharp contours of Augustan verse. That is to 
say, it produces an effect which cannot be wholly 
accounted for by what the poet says; an effect which 
is wrought by subtle sensations awakened by the sound 
and indefinite associations evoked by the words. The 
secret of this art the poet himself cannot communicate. 
But poetry of this kind cannot be translated into 
prose — as Pope's can — any more than music can be 
translated into speech, without losing its essential 
character. Like Spenser, Thomson was an exquisite 
colorist and his art was largely pictorial. But he has 

' touches of an imagination which is rarer, if not higher 
in kind, than anything in Spenser. The fairyland 
of Spenser is an unreal, but hardly an unearthly region. 

/^He seldom startles by glimpses behind the curtain 



94 ^ History of English '^Romanticism. 

which hangs between nature and the supernatural, as 
in Milton's 

" Airy tongues that syllable men's names 
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses." 



There is something of this power in one stanza, at 
least, of **The Castle of Indolence:" 

" As when a shepherd of the Hebrid Isles, 
Placed far amid the melancholy main 
(Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles, 
Or that aerial beings sometimes deign 
To stand embodied to our senses plain), 
Sees on the naked hill or valley low. 
The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain, 
A vast assembly moving to and fro. 
Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show." 

It may be guessed that Johnson and Boswell, in their 
tour to the Hebrides or Western Islands, saw nothing 
of the ''spectral puppet play" hinted at in this pas- 
sage — the most imaginative in any of Spenser's school 
till we get to Keats' 

" Magic casements opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn." 

X. William Julius Mickle, the translator of the 
*'Lusiad," was a more considerable poet than any of 
the Spenserian imitators thus far reviewed, with the 
exception of Thomson and the possible exception of 
Shenstone. He wrote at least two poems that are 
likely to be remembered. One of these was the ballad 
of ''Cumnor Hall" which suggested Scott's '' Kenil- 
worth," and came near giving its name to the novel. 



The Spenserians, 95 

The other was the dialect song of "The Mariner's 
Wife," which Burns admired so greatly: 

" Sae true his heart, sae smooth his speech, 

His breath like caller air. 
His very foot has music in't. 

As he comes up the stair. 
For there's nae luck about the house, 

There is nae luck at a', 
There's little pleasure in the house 

When our gudeman's awa'." * 

Mickle, like Thomson, was a Scotchman who came 
to London to push his literary fortunes. He received 
some encouragement from Lyttelton, but was dis- 
appointed in his hopes of any substantial aid from that 
British Mecaenas. His biographer informs us that 
"about his thirteenth year, on Spenser's 'Faerie 
Queene ' falling accidentally in his way, he was im- 
mediately struck with the picturesque descriptions 
of that much admired ancient bard and powerfully 
incited to imitate his style and manner." f In 1767 
Mickle published "The Concubine," a Spenserian, 
poem in two cantos. In the preface to his second^ 
edition, 1778, in which the title was changed to "Syr 
Martyn," he said that: " The fullness and wantonness 
of description, the quaint simplicity, and, above all, 
the ludicrous, of which the antique phraseology and 
manner of Spenser are so happily and peculiarly sus- 
ceptible, inclined him to esteem it not solely as the 

* Mickle's authorship of this song has been disputed in favor of 
one Jean Adams, a poor Scotch school-mistress, whose poems were 
printed at Glasgow in 1734. 

fRev. John Sim's "Life of Mickle" in "Mickle's Poetical 
Works," 1806, p. xi. 



^ 



96 aA History of English 'T^omanticism. 

best, but the only mode of composition adapted to hi& 
subject." 

"Syr Martyn " is a narrative poem not devoid ofe 
animation, especially where the author forgets hi; 
Spenser. But in the second canto he feels compelledi 
to introduce an absurd allegory, in which the nymphi 
Dissipation and her henchman Self-Imposition conduct! 
the hero to the cave of Discontent. This is how* 
Mickle writes when he is thinking of the "Faerie 
ueene ": 

" Eke should he, freed from foul enchanter's spell, 
Escape his false Duessa's magic charms, 
And folly quaid, yclept an hydra fell, 
Receive a beauteous lady to his arms ; 
While bards and minstrels chaunt the soft alarms 
Of gentle love, unlike his former thrall : 
Eke should I sing, in courtly cunning terms, 
The gallant feast, served up by seneschal, 
To knights and ladies gent in painted bower or hall." 

And this is how he writes when he drops his pattern 

" Awake, ye west winds, through the lonely dale, 
And, Fancy, to thy faerie bower betake ! 
Even now, with balmy freshness, breathes the gale, 
Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake ; 
Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake, 
And evening comes with locks bedropt with dew ; 
On Desmond's moldering turrets slowly shake 
The trembling rye-grass and the harebell blue. 
And ever and anon fair Mulla's plaints renew." 

A reader would be guilty of no very bad guess who 
should assign this stanza — which Scott greatly ad- 
mired — to one of the Spenserian passages that pre- 
lude the " Lady of the Lake." 

But it is needless to extend this catalogue any 



The Spenserians. 97 

farther. By the middle of the century Spenserism had 
become so much the fashion as to provoke a rebuke ' 
from Dr. Johnson, who prowled up and down before~>^ 
the temple of the British Muses like a sort of classical 
watch-dog. '*The imitation of Spenser," said the 
Rambler of May 14, 1751, "by the influence of some 
men of learning and genius, seems likely to gairi/ 
upon the age. . . To imitate the fictions and senti-/\ 
ments of Spenser can incur no reproach, for allegory 
is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of instruc- 
tion. But I am very far from extending the same 
respect to his diction or his stanza. His style was, in 
his own time, allowed to be vicious; so darkened with 
old words and peculiarities of phrase, and so remote 
from common use, that Jonson boldly pronounces 
him to have written no language. His stanza is at once 
difficult and unpleasing: tiresome to the ear by its 
uniformity, and to the attention by its length. . . 
Life is surely given us for other purposes than to ■ 
gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away 
and to learn what is of no value but because it has been 
forgotten." * In his "Life of West," Johnson says of 

* Cf. Joseph Warton's " Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 35. "It has 
been fashionable of late to imitate Spenser ; but the likeness of most 
of these copies hath consisted rather in using a few of his ancient 
expressions than in catching his real manner. Some, however, have 
been executed with happiness, and with attention to that simplicity, 
■hat tenderness of sentiment and those little touches of nature that 
:onstitute Spenser's character. I have a peculiar pleasure in men- 
:ioning two of them, * The Schoolmistress ' by Mr. Shenstone, and 
'The Education of Achilles' by Mr. Bedingfield. And also Dr. 
Seattle's charming ' Minstrel.' To these must be added that 
xquisite piece of wild and romantic imagery, Thomson's ' Castle of 
[ndolence.' " 



98 <iA History of English Romanticism, 

West's imitations of Spenser, ** Such compositions are 
not to be reckoned among the great achievements of 
intellect, because their effect is local and temporary: 
they appeal not to reason or passion, but to memory, 
and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of 
mind. An imitation of Spencer is nothing to a reader, 
however acute, by whom Spenser has never been 
perused." 

The critic is partly right. The nice points of a 
parody are lost upon a reader unacquainted with the 
thing parodied. And as for serious imitations, the 
more cleverly a copyist follows his copy, the less value 
his work will have. The eighteenth-century Spen- 
serians, like West, Cambridge, and Lloyd, who stuck_ 
most closely to their pattern, oblivion has covered. 
Their real service was done in reviving a taste for a 
better kind of poetry than the kind in vogue, and par- 
ticularly in restoring to English verse a stanza form, 
which became so noble an instrument in the hands of 
later poets, who used it with as much freedom and 
vigor as if they had never seen the *' Faerie Queene." 
One is seldom reminded of Spenser while reading 
**Childe Harold"* or " Adonais " or **The Eve of 
Saint Agnes"; but in reading West or Cambridge, or 
even in reading Shenstone and Thomson, one is 
reminded of him at every turn. Yet if it was neces- 
sary to imitate anyone, it might be answered to Dr. 

* Byron, to be sure, began his first canto with conscious Spen- 
serism. He called his poem a " romaunt," and his valet, poor 
Fletcher, a " stanch yeoman," and peppered his stanzas thinly with 
sooths and wights and ivhiloms, but he gave over this affectation in 
the later cantos and made no further excursions into the Middle 
Ages. 



The Spenser tans. 99 

Johnson that it was better to imitate Spenser than 
Pope. In the imitation of Spenser lay, at least, a ^ 
future, a development; while the imitation of Pope 
was conducting steadily toward Darwin's ''Botanic 
Garden." 

It remains to notice one more document in the 
history of this Spenserian revival, Thomas Warton's 
"Observations on the Faerie Queen," 1754. Warton 
wrote with a genuine delight in his subject. His 
tastes were frankly romantic. But the apologetic air 
which antiquarian scholars assumed, when venturing 
to recommend their favorite studies to the attention 
of a classically minded public, is not absent from 
Warton's commentary. He writes as if he felt the 
pressure of an unsympathic atmosphere all about him. 
*' We who live in the days of writing by rule are apt to 
try every composition by those laws which we have 
been taught to think the sole criterion of excellence. 
Critical taste is universally diffused, and we require 
the same order and design which every modern per- 
formance is expected to have, in poems where they 
never were regarded or intended. . . If there be any 
poem whose graces please because they are situated 
beyond the reach of art*. . . it is this. In reading 
Spenser, if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is 
transported." "In analyzing the plan and conduct 
Df this poem, I have so far tried it by epic rules, as 
o demonstrate the inconveniences and incongruities 
Yhich the poet might have avoided, had he been more 
itudious of design and uniformity. It is true that 
lis romantic materials claim great liberties; but no 

* Pope's, " Snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." 

— Essay on Criticism. 



100 ^ History of English 'Romanticism, 

materials exclude order and perspicacity." Warton 
assures the reader that Spenser's language is not "sa 
difficult and obsolete as it is generally supposed ta 
be;" and defends him against Hume's censure,* that 
'* Homer copied true natural manners . . . but the 
pencil of the English poet was employed in draw- 
ing the affectations and conceits and fopperies of 
chivalry." 

Yet he began his commentary with the stock 
denunciations of ** Gothic ignorance and barbarity." 
" At the renaissance it might have been expected that, 
instead of the romantic manner of poetical composi- 
tion ... a new and more legitimate taste of writing 
would have succeeded. . . But it was a long time 
before such a change was effected. We find Ariosto, 
many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth 
for magic, and preferring the ridiculous and incoherent 
excursions of Boiardo to the propriety and uniformity 
of the Grecian and Roman models. Nor did the 
restoration of ancient learning produce any effectual 
or immediate improvement in the state of criticism. 
Beni, one of the most celebrated critics of the sixteenth 
century, was still so infatuated with a fondness for the 
old Provencal vein, that he ventured to write a regular 
dissertation, in which he compares Ariosto with 
Homer." Warton says again, of Ariosto and the 
Italian renaissance poets whom Spenser followed, " I 
have found no fault in general with their use of magical 
machinery; notwithstanding I have so far conformed 
to the reigning maxims of modern criticism as to 
recommend classical propriety." Notwithstanding 
this prudent determination to conform, the author 

*" History of England," Vol. II. p. 739. 



The Spenserians. loi 

takes heart in his second volume to speak out as fol- 
lows about the pseudo-classic poetry of his own age: 
''A poetry succeeded in which imagination gave way 
to correctness, sublimity of description to delicacy 
of sentiment, and majestic imagery to conceit and 
epigram. Poets began now to be more attentive to . 
words than to things and objects. The nicer beauties I 
of happy expression were preferred to the daring 
strokes of great conception. Satire, that bane of the 
sublime, was imported from France. The muses were 
debauched at court; and polite life and familiar man- 
ners became their only themes." 

By the time these words were written Spenser had 
done his work. Color, music, fragrance were stealing 
back again into English song, and " golden-tongued 
romance with serene lute " stood at the door of the 
new age, waiting for it to open. 



CHAPTER IV. 
; XLbc XanDscape ipoet6. 

There is nothing necessarily romantic in literature 
that concerns itself with rural life or natural scenery. 
Yet we may accept, with some qualification, the truth 
of Professor McClintock's statement, that the '' begin- 
ning and presence of a creative, romantic movement is 
almost always shown by the love, study, and interpre- 
tation of physical nature."* Why this should be true, 
at all events of the romantic movement that began in 
the eighteenth century, is obvious enough. Ruskin and 
Leslie Stephen have already been quoted, as witnesses 
'to the fact that naturalism and romanticism had a 
^common root: the desire, namely, to escape into the 
fresh air and into freer conditions, from a literature 
which dealt, in a strictly regulated way, with the in- 
Idoor life of a highly artificial society. The past oral 
nad ceased to furnish any relief. Professing to chant 
the praises of innocence and simplicity, it had become 
itself utterly unreal and conventional, in the hands of 
cockneys like Philips and Pope. AVhen the romantic 
spirit took possession of the poetry of nature, it mani- 
fested itself in a passion for wildness, grandeur, soli-v ^ 
tude. Of this there was as yet comparatively littlelf 
even in the verse of Thomson, Shenstone, Akenside, I 
and Dyer. I 

*W. D. McClintock, "The Romantic and Classical in EnglisK I 
Literature," Chautauquan, Vol. XIV. p. 187. L 



The Landscape Toets, 103 

Still the work of these pioneers in the "return to 
nature " represents the transition, and must be taken 
into account in any .complete history of the romantic 
movement. The first two, as we have seen, were 
among the earliest Spenserians: Dyer was a landscape, 
painter, as well as a poet; and Shenstone was one ofl 
the best of landscape gardeners. But it is the begin- 
nings that are important. It will be needless to 
pursue the history of nature poetry into its later 
developments; needless to review the writings of 
Cowper and Crabbe, for example, — neither of whomi 
was romantic in any sense, — or even of Wordsworth,* 
the spirit of whose art, as a whole, was far from 
romantic. 

Before taking up the writers above named, one by 
one, it will be well to notice the general change in the 
forms of verse, which was an outward sign of the 
revolution in poetic feeling. The imitation of Spenser 
was only one instance of a readiness to lay aside the 
heroic couplet in favor of other kinds which it had 
displaced, and in the interests of greater variety. 
''During the twenty-five years," says Mr. Gosse, 
''from the publication of Thomson's 'Spring* 
['Winter'] in 1726, to that of Gray's 'Elegy' in 
1751, the nine or ten leading poems or collections of 
verse which appeared were all of a new type; somber, 
as a rule, certainly stately, romantic in tone to the 
extreme, prepared to return, ignorantly indeed, but 
with respect, to what was ' Gothic ' in manners, archi- 
tecture, and language; all showing a more or less vague^ 
aspiration towards the study of nature, and not one I 
composed in the heroic couplet hitherto so vigorously 
imposed on serious verse. 'The Seasons,' 'Night 



I04 <v^ History of English Romanticism. 

Thoughts* and * The Grave* are written in blank 
verse: * The Castle of Indolence' and ' The School- 
mistress ' in Spenserian stanza; *The Spleen' and 
* Grongar Hill ' in octosyllabics, while the early odes 
of Gray and those of Collins are composed in a great 
\ variety of simple but novel lyric measures." * 

The only important writer who had employed blank 
verse in undramatic poetry between the publication 
of ** Paradise Regained" in 1672, and Thomson's 
*' Winter" in 1726, was John Philips. Vin the brief 
prefatory note to *' Paradise Lost," the poet of 
''L'Allegro" and ** II Penseroso," forgetting or dis- 
daining the graces of his youthful muse, had spoken 
, of rhyme as '' the invention of a barbarous age," as " a 
thing trivial and of no true musical delight." Milton's 
example, of course, could not fail to give dignity and 
authority to the majestic rhythm that he had used; 
and Philips' mock-heroic **The Splendid Shilling" 
(1701), his occasional piece, ** Blenheim" (1705), and. 
his Georgic " Cyder " (1706), were all in avowed imita- 
tion of Milton. But the well-nigh solitary character of 
Philips' experiments was recognized by Thomson, in 
his allusion to the last-named poem: 

" Philips, Pomona's bard, the second thou 
Who nobly durst, in rime-unfettered verse, 
"With British freedom sing the British song." f 

In speaking of Philips' imitations of Milton, John- 
son said that if the latter "had written after the 
improvements made by Dryden, it is reasonable to 

* " Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 207. 
f " Autumn," lines 645-47. 



7he Landscape Toets. 105 

believe he would have admitted a more pleasing . 
modulatian of numbers into his work." * Johnson 
hated Adam Smith, but when Boswell mentioned that 
Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow Univer- 
sity, had given the preference to rhyme over blank 
verse, the doctor exclaimed, '*Sir, I was once in 
company with Smith and v;e did not take to each 
other; but had I known that he loved rhyme as 
much as you tell me he does, I should have hugged 
him." 

In 1725 James Thomson, a young Scotchman, came 
to London to push his literary fortunes. His country- 
man, David Malloch, — or Mallet, as he called himself 
in England, — at that time private tutor in the family of 
the Duke of Montrose, procured Thomson introduc- 
tions into titled society, and helped him to bring out 
** Winter," the first installment of ''The Seasons," 
which was published in 1726. Thomson's friend and 
biographer (1762), the Rev. Patrick Murdoch, saysj 
that the poem was "no sooner read than universally-)s 
admired; those only excepted who had not been used 
to feel, or to look for anything in poetry beyond a point 
of satirical or epigrammatic wit, a smart antithesis 
richly trimmed with rhyme." This is a palpable hit 
at the Popean school; and indeed there could be no 
stronger contrast than between Thomson and Pope, 
not alone in subject and feeling, but in diction and 
verse. Thomson's style is florid and luxuriant, his 
numbers flowing and diffuse, while Pope had wonted 
the English ear to the extreme of compression in both 
language and meter. Pope is among the most quota- 
ble of poets, while Thomson's long poem, in spite of S 
*" Life of Philips." 



io6 ^ History of English l^manticism. 

its enduring popularity, has contributed but a single 
phrase to the stock of current quotation : 

" To teach the young idea how to shoot." 

*' Winter" was followed by "Summer" in 1727, 1 
"Spring" in 1728, and the completed "Seasons" 
in 1730. Thomson made many changes and additions 
in subsequent editions. The original " Seasons " con- 
tained only 3902 lines (exclusive of the "Hymn"), 
while the author's final revision of 1746 gave 5413. 
One proof that "The Seasons" was the work of a 
fresh and independent genius is afforded by the many 

imitations to which it soon gave birth. In Germany, 
a passage from Brookes' translation (1745) was set to 
music by Haydn. J. P. Uz (1742) and Wieland each . 
producd a "Fruhling," in Thomson's manner; but the 
most distinguished of his German disciples was 
Ewald Christian von Kleist, whose "Fruhling" 
(1749) was a description of a country walk in spring, 
in 460 hexameter lines, accompanied, as in Thomson's 
"Hymn," with a kind of "Gloria in excelsis," to the 
creator of nature. "The Seasons" was translated* 
into French by Madame Bontemps in 1759, and called 
forth, among other imitations, "Les Saisons " of SainfcV 
Lambert, 1769 (revised and extended in 1771.) In 
England, Thomson's influence naturally manifested 
itself less in direct imitations of the scheme of his 
poem than in the contagion of his manner, which 
pervades the work of many succeeding poets, such as 
Akenside, Armstrong, Dyer, Somerville and Mallet. 
" There was hardly one verse writer of any eminence," 

r says Gosse, * "from 1725-50, who was not in some 

* " Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 221. 



The Landscape Toets. 107 

manner guided or biased by Thomson, whose genius is 
to this day fertile in English literature." 

We have grown so acccustomed to a more intimate 
treatment and a more spiritual interpretation of 
nature, that we are perhaps too apt to undervalue 
Thomson's simple descriptive or pictorial method. 
Compared with Wordsworth's mysticism, with Shelley's 
passionate pantheism, with Byron's romantic gloom in 
presence of the mountains and the sea, with Keats' joy- 
ous re-creation of mythology, with Thoreau's Indian- 
like approach to the innermost arcana — with a dozen 
other moods familiar to the modern mind — it seems 
to us unimaginative. Thomson has been likened, as 
a colorist, to Rubens; and possibly the glow, the 
breadth, and the vital energy of his best passages, 
as of Rubens' great canvases, leave our finer percep- 
tions untouched, and we ask for something more 
esoteric, more intense. Still there are permanent and 
solid qualities in Thomson's landscape art, which can 
give delight even now to an unspoiled taste. To a 
reader of his own generation, "The Seasons" must 
have come as the revelation of a fresh world of 
beauty. Such passages as those which describe the 
first spring showers, the thunderstorm in summer, the 
trout-fishing, the sheep-vv^ashing, and the terrors ofl 
the winter night, were not only strange to the public 
of that day, but were new in English poetry. 

That the poet was something of a naturaHst, who 
wrote lovingly and with his **eye upon the object," 
is evident from a hundred touches, like ** auriculas 
with shining meal"; 

" The yellow wall-flower stained with iron brown ; " 
or, 



io8 zA History of English ^Romanticism. 

" The bittern knows his time, with bill engulfed, 
To shake the sounding marsh." * 

Thomson's scenery was genuine, v/ His images of 
external nature are never false ami seldom vague, 
like Pope's. In a letter to Lyttelton,f he speaks of 
"the Muses of the great simple country, not the 
little fine-lady Muses of Richmond Hill." His 
delineations, if less sharp and finished in detail than 
Cowper's, have greater breadth. Coleridge's com- 
parison of the two poets is well known: '*The love 
of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful 
religion, and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to 
a love of nature. . . In chastity of diction and the 
harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson 
immeasurably below him; yet I still feel the latter to 
have been the born poet." 

The geologist Hugh Miller, who visited Lyttelton's 
country seat at Hagley in 1845, describes the famous 
landscape which Thompson had painted in " Spring": 

" Meantime you gain the height from whose fair brow 
The bursting prospect spreads immense around, 
And, snatched o'er hill and dale and wood and lawn, 
And verdant field and darkening heath between, 
And villages embosomed soft in trees, 
And spiry towns, by surging columns marked 
Of household smoke, your eye extensive roams. . . 
To where the broken landscape, by degrees 
Ascending, roughens into rigid hills. 
O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds, 
That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise." 

* Cf. Chaucer: " And as a bitoure bumbleth in the mire." 

— Wyf of Bathes Tale, 
f Phillimore's " Life of Lyttelton," Vol. I. p. 286. 



The Landscape Toets. 109 

*<The entire prospect," says Miller,* — ''one of the 
finest in England, and eminently characteristic of 
what is best in English scenery — enabled me to under- 
stand what I had used to deem a peculiarity — in some 
measure a defect — in the landscapes of the poet 
Thomson. It must have often struck the Scotch 
reader that, in dealing with very extended prospects, 
he rather enumerates than describes. His pictures 
are often mere catalogues, in which single words 
stand for classes of objects, and in which the entire 
poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of 
vast extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. . . 
Now the prospect from the hill at Hagley furnished 
me with the true explanation of this enumerative 
style. Measured along the horizon, it must, on the 
lowest estimate, be at least fifty miles in longitudinal 
extent; measured laterally, from the spectator for- 
wards, at least twenty. . . The real area must rather 
exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles: 
the fields into which it is laid out are small, scarcely 
averaging a square furlong in superficies. . . With 
these there are commixed innumerable cottages, 
manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the surface is 
dimpled by unreckoned hollows; there fretted by 
uncounted mounds; all is amazing, overpowering 
multiplicity — a multiplicity which neither the pen nor 
the pencil can adequately express; and so description, 
in even the hands of a master, sinks into mere enumer- 
ation. The picture becomes a catalogue." 

Wordsworth f pronounced '' The Seasons " ** a work 
of inspiration," and said that much of it was ''written 

* " First Impressions of England," p. 135. 

f Appendix to Preface to the Second Edition of '* Lyrical Ballads.'* 



\^' 



no ciA History of English T^omanticism. 

from himself, and nobly from himself," but complained 
that the style was vicious. Thomson's diction is, ir 
truth, not always worthy of his poetic feeling and 
panoramic power over landscape. It is academic andl 
often tumid and wordy, abounding in latinisms like 
effusive, precipitant, irriguous, horrific, turge?it, amusive. 
The lover who hides by the stream where his mistress 
is bathing — that celebrated "serio-comic bathing" — 
is described as **the latent Damon"; and when the 
poet advises against the use of worms for trout bait, 
he puts it thus: 

" But let not on your hook the tortured worm 
Convulsive writhe in agonizing folds," etc. 

The poets had now begun to withdraw from tov/n 
and go out into the country, but in their retirement to 
the sylvan shades they were accompanied sometimes, 
indeed, by Collins' mountain nymph, *' sweet Liberty," 
but quite as frequently by Shenstone's nymph, "coy 
Elegance," who kept reminding them of Vergil. 

Thomson's blank verse, although, as Coleridge says, 
inferior to Cowper's, is often richly musical and with 
an energy unborrowed of Milton — as Cowper's is too 
apt to be, at least in his translation of Homer.* Mr. 

* There are, of course, Miltonic reminiscences in " The Seasons.'* 
The moon's " spotted disk " ('* Autumn," 109 1) is Milton's " spotty 
globe." The apostrophe to light ("Spring" 90-96) borrows its 
"efflux divine" from Milton's "bright effluence of bright essence 
increate" ("Paradise Lost," III. i-i2.) And cf. "Autumn," 

783-S4: 

" — from Imaus stretcht 
Athwart the roving Tartar's sullen bounds," 
with P. L., III. 431-32; and " Winter," 1005-08. 

" — moors 
Beneath the shelter of an icy isle, 
While night o'erwhelms the sea." 
with P. L., I. 207-208. 



The Landscape Toets. 1 1 1 

Saintsbury * detects a mannerism in the verse of I 
''The Seasons," which he illustrates by citing three 
lines with which the poet '* caps the climax of three 
several descriptive passages, all within the compass of 
half a dozen pages," viz. : 

** And Egypt joys beneath the spreading wave." 

" And Mecca saddens at the long delay." 

" And Thule bellows through her utmost isles." 

It would be easy to add many other instances of 
this type of climacteric line, e. g. ("Summer," 859), 

" And Ocean trembles for his green domain." 

For the blank verse of '' The Seasons " is a blank verse 
which has been passed through the strainer of the 
heroic couplet. Though Thomson, in the flow and 
continuity of his measure, offers, as has been said, the 
greatest contrast to Pope's system of versification; 
yet wherever he seeks to be nervous, his modulation 
reminds one more of Pope's antithetical trick than of 
Shakspere's or Milton's freer structure. For instance 
{''Spring," 1015): 

" Fills every sense and pants in every vein." 

or {Ibid. 1 104) : 

" Flames through the nerves and boils along the veins." 

To relieve the monotony of a descriptive poem, the\ 
author introduced moralizing digressions: advice tol 
the husbandman and the shepherd after the manner of 
the "Georgics"; compliments to his patrons, like 
Lyttelton, Bubb Dodington, and the Countess of 

* " Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. p. 171. 



112 <iA History of English 'T^pmanticism, 

. Hertford; and sentimental narrative episodes, such as 
the stories of Damon and Musidora,* and Celadon, 
and Amelia in ''Summer," and of Lavinia and Palemonf 
in ** Autumn "; while ever and anon his eye extensive 
roamed over the phenomena of nature in foreign 
climes, the arctic night, the tropic summer, etc. 
Wordsworth asserts that these sentimental passages 

Y' are the parts of the work which were probably most 
^efficient in first recommending the author to general 
notice." J They strike us now as insipid enough. 
But many coming attitudes cast their shadows before 
across the page of "The Seasons." Thomson's de- 
nunciation of the slave trade, and of cruelty to animals, 

,' especially the caging of birds and the coursing of 

\v hares; his preference of country to town; his rhapso- 
dies on domestic love and the innocence of the Golden 
Age; his contrast between the misery of the poor and 
the heartless luxury of the rich; all these features of 
the poem foretoken the sentimentalism of Sterne and 
Goldsmith, and the humanitarianism of Cowper and 
Burns. They anticipate, in particular, that half af- 
fected itch of simplicity which titillated the sensibili- 
ties of a corrupt and artificial society in the writings 
of Rousseau and the idyllic pictures of Bernardin de 
St. Pierre's ''Paul and Virginia." Thomson went so 

* There were originally i/ir^e damsels in the bathing scene! 

f It was to this episode that Pope supplied the lines (207-14) 
"Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty's self," etc., 
which form his solitary essay in blank verse. Thomson told Col- 
lins that he took the first hint of "The Seasons" from the names 
of the divisions — Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter — in Pope's 
" Pastorals." 

:{: Appendix to Preface to Second Edition of " Lyrical Ballads." 



The Landscape Toets. 113 

far in this vein as to decry the use of animal food in a 
passage which recalls Goldsmith's stanza: * 

" No flocks that range the valley free 
To slaughter I condemn: 
Taught by the power that pities me, 
I learn to pity them." 

This sort of thing was in the air. Pope was not a 
sentimental person, yet even Pope had written 

" The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, 
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play ? 
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food. 
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood." f 

It does not appear that Thomson was personally 
averse to a leg of mutton. His denunciations of 
luxury, and his praise of early rising | and cold bath- 
ing § sound rather hollow from the lips of a bard — 
'' more fat than bard beseems " — who used to lie abed 
till noon, and who, as Savage told Johnson, **was per- 
haps never in cold water in his life." Johnson reports, 
not without some spice of malice, that the Countess of 
Hertford, '' whose practice it was to invite every sum- 
mer some poet into the country, to hear her verses and 
assist her studies," extended this courtesy to Thomson, 
**who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hert- 
ford and his friends than assisting her ladyship's 

* "The Hermit." 

f ♦• Essay on Man," Epistle I. 

X " Falsely luxurious, will not man awake ?" etc. 

— Summer, 67. 
§ " Nor, when cold winter keens the brightening flood, 
Would I, weak shivering, linger on the brink." 

—Ibid. 1259-60. 



114 ^ History of English Romanticism. 

poetical operations, and therefore never received 
another summons." * 

The romantic note is not absent from "The 
Seasons," but it is not prominent. Thomson's themei 
was the changes of the year as they affect the English 
landscape, a soft, cultivated landscape of lawns, gar-J 
dens, fields, orchards, sheep-walks, and forest pre-* 
serves. Only now and then that attraction toward the 
savage, the awful, the mysterious, the primitive, which 
marks the romantic mood in naturalistic poetry, shows 
itself in touches like these: 

" High from the summit of a craggy cliff, 
Hung o'er the deep, such as amazing frowns 
On utmost Kilda's shore, whose lonely race 
Resigns the setting sun to Indian worlds." f 

" Or where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls, 
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles 
Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge 
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides. "^ 

Compare also the description of the thunderstorm in 
the mountains ('' Summer," 1156-68), closing with the 
lines: 

" Far seen the heights of heathy Cheviot blaze, 
And Thule bellows through her utmost isles." 

The Western Islands appear to have had a peculiar 
fascination for Thomson. The passages above quoted, 
and the stanza from ** The Castle of Indolence," cited 
on page 94, gave Collins the clew for his '' Ode on 
the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," which 
contained, says Lowell, the whole romantic school 

*" Life of Thomson." f " Spring." 755-58. 

t " Autumn," 862-65. 



The Landscape T^oets, 115 

in the germ. Thomson had perhaps found the 
embryon atom in Milton's "stormy Hebrides," in 
*'Lycidas," whose echo is prolonged in Words- 
worth's " Solitary Reaper " — 

" Breaking the silence of the seas 
Among the farthest Hebrides." 

Even Pope — he had a soul — was not unsensitive to 
this, as witness his 

" Loud as the wolves, on Orcas* stormy steep, 
Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep." * 

The melancholy which Victor Hugo pronounces a dis- 
tinguishing badge of romantic art, and which we shall 
see gaining more and more upon English poetry as 
the century advanced, is also discernible in " The 
Seasons " in a passage like the following: 

" O bear me then to vast embowering shades, 
To twilight groves and visionary vales, 
To weeping grottos and prophetic glooms ; 
Where angel-forms athwart the solemn dusk 
Tremendous sweep, or seem to sweep along ; 
And voices more than human, through the void, 
Deep-sounding, seize the enthusiastic ear ; " f 

or this, which recalls *'I1 Penseroso": 

" Now all amid the rigors of the year, 

In the wild depth of winter, while without 
The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat 

* " Epistle to Augustus." 

t" Autumn," 1030-37. Cf. Cowper's 

"O for a lodge in some vast wilderness. 
Some boundless contiguity of shade ! " 



1 16 c^ History of English Romanticism, 

Between the groaning forest and the shore, 

Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, 

A rural, sheltered, solitary scene ; 

Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join 

To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit 

And hold high converse with the mighty dead." * 

The revival again, of the preternatural and of popular 
superstitions as literary material, after a rationalizing] 
and skeptical age, is signalized by such a passage asj 
this: 

* * Onward they pass, o'er many a panting height, 
And valley sunk and unfrequented, where 
At fall of eve the fairy people throng, 
In various game and revelry to pass 
The summer night, as village stories tell. 
But far around they wander from the grave 
Of him whom his ungentle fortune urged 
Against his own sad breast to lift the hand 
Of impious violence. The lonely tower 
Is also shunned, whose mournful chambers hold, 
So night-struck fancy dreams, the yelling ghost." 

It may not be uninstructive to note the occurrence of 
the word ro7nantic at several points in the poem : \ 

' ' glimmering shades and sympathetic glooms, 
Where the dim umbrage o'er the falling stream 
Romantic hangs. f 

This is from a passage in which romantic love once 
more comes back into poetry, after its long eclipse; 
and in which the lover is depicted as wandering abroad 
at ''pensive dusk," or by moonlight, through groves* 

* "Winter," 424-32. \ " Spring," 1026-28. 



The Landscape T^oets. 117 

and along brooksides.* The word is applied likewise 
to clouds, ''rolled into romantic shapes, the dream of 
waking fancy"; and to the scenery of Scotland— 
'* Caledonia in romantic view." In a subtler way, the 
feeling of such lines as these is romantic: 

" Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart. 
As home he goes beneath the joyous moon ; " 

or these, of the comparative lightness of the summer 
night: 

" A faint, erroneous ray. 
Glanced from the imperfect surfaces of things, 
Flings half an image on the straining eye." 

In a letter to Stonehewer (June 29, 1760), Gray com- 
ments thus upon a passage from Ossian: 

" * Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night: 

Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind: 
Their songs are of other worlds.^ 

Did you never observe {while rocking ivinds are piping 
loud) that pause, as the gust is re-collecting itself, and 
rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive note, like 
the soul of an ^olian harp? I do assure you, there 
is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit. 
Thomson had an ear sometimes: he was not deaf to 
this, and has described it gloriously, but given it 
another, different turn, and of more horror. I cannot 

* Shakspere's "broom groves whose shade the dismist bachelor 
loves : " 



Fletcher's 



and his 



" Fountain heads and pathless groves, 
Places which pale passion loves," 

" Moonlight walks when all the fowls 
Are safely housed, save bats and owls. 



ii8 tA History of English Romanticism. 

repeat the lines: it is in his * Winter.'" The lines 
that Gray had in mind were probably these (191-94): 

" Then, too, they say, through all the burdened air, 
Long groans are heard, shrill sounds and distant sighs 
That, uttered by the demon of the night, 
Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death." 

Thomson appears to have been a sweet-tempered, 
indolent man, constant in friendship and much loved 
by his friends. He had a little house and grounds 
in Kew Lane where he used to compose poetry on 
autumn nights and loved to listen to the nightingales 
in Richmond Garden; and where, sang Collins, in his 
ode on the poet's death (1748), 

" Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, 

When Thames in summer wreaths is drest, 
And oft suspend the dashing oar 
To bid his gentle spirit rest." 

Collins had been attracted to Richmond by Thomson's 
residence there, and forsook the neighborhood after 
his friend's death. 

Joseph Warton, in his ** Essay on Pope" (1756), 
testified that "The Seasons" had been **very instru- 
mental in diffusing a taste for the beauties of naturq 
and landscape." One evidence of this diffused tasta 
was the rise of the new or natural school of landscape 
gardening. This was a purely English art, and Gray, 
writing in 1763,* says **It is not forty years since the 
art was born among us; and it is sure that there was 
nothing in Europe like it": he adds that *' our skill ir 
gardening and laying out grounds " is ** the onlj 

* Letter to Howe, September 10. 



The Landscape T^oets, 1 1 9 

taste we can call our own, the only proof of our 
original talent in matter of pleasure." ** Neither 
Italy nor France have ever had the least notion of it, 
nor yet do at all comprehend it, when they see it."* 
Gray's ''not forty years" carries us back with suffi- 
cient precision to the date of "The Seasons" (1726- 
30), and it is not perhaps giving undue credit to 
Thomson, to acknowledge him as, in a great measure, 
the father of the national school of landscape garden\ 
ing. That this has always been recognized upon the 
Continent as an art of English invention, is evidenced 
by the names Englische Garten^ jar din Anglais^ still 
given in Germany and France to pleasure grounds 
laid out in the natural taste, f Schopenhauer gives 
the philosophy of the opposing styles as follows: 
*' The great distinction between the English and the 
old French garden rests, in the last analysis, upon 
this, viz., that the former are laid out in the object- 

* Letter to Howe, November, 1763. 

f Alicia Amherst (" History of Gardening in England," 1896, p. 
283) mentions a French and an Italian work, entitled respectively 
" Plan de Jardins dans le gout Anglais," Copenhagen, 1798; and 
" Del Arte dei Giardini Inglesi," Milan, 1801. "This passion for 
the imitation of nature," says the same authority, " was part of the 
general reaction which was taking place, not only in gardening but 
in the world of literature and of fashion. The extremely artificial 
French taste had long taken the lead in civilized Europe, and now 
there was an attempt to shake off the shackles of its exaggerated 
formalism. The poets of the age were also pioneers of this school of 
nature. Dyer, in his poem of ' Grongar Hill,' and Thomson, in his 
' Seasons,' called up pictures which the gardeners and architects of 
the day strove to imitate." See in this work, for good examples 
of the formal garden, the plan of Belton House, Lincoln, p. 245; of 
Brome Hall, Suffolk ; of the orangery and canal at Euston, p. 201 ; 
and the scroll work patterns of turf and parterres on pp. 217-18. 



I20 zA History of English Romanticism. 

ive, the latter in the subjective sense, that is to say, i 
in the former the will of Nature, as it manifests 
(objektivirt) itself in tree, mountain, and water, is 
brought to the purest possible expression of its ideas, 
/. €., of its own being. In the French gardens, on the 
other hand, there is reflected only the will of the 
owner who has subdued Nature, so that, instead of 
her own ideas, she wears as tokens of her slavery, 
ithe forms which he has forced upon her — clipped 
hedges, trees cut into all manner of shapes, straight 
alleys, arched walks, etc." 

It would be unfair to hold the false taste of Pope's 
generation responsible for that formal style of garden- 
ing which prevailed when *'The Seasons " was written. 
The old-fashioned Italian or French or Dutch garden — 
as it was variously called — antedated the Augustan era, 
which simply inherited it from the seventeenth cen- 
tury. In Bacon's essay on gardens, as well as in the 
essays on the same subject by Cowley and Sir William 
Temple, the ideal pleasure ground is very much like that 
which Le Notre realized so brilliantly at Versailles.* 
Addison, in fact, in the Spectator (No. 414) and Pope 
himself in the Guardian (No. 173) ridiculed the 
excesses of the reigning mode, and Pope attacked 
them again in his description of Timon's Villa in the 
** Epistle to the Earl of Burlington " (1731), which was 
thought to be meant for Canons, the seat of the Duke 
of Chandos. 

*In Temple's gardens at Moor Park, Hertfordshire, e. g., there 
were terraces covered with lead. Charles II. imported some of Le 
Notre's pupils and assistants, who laid out the grounds at Hampton 
Court in the French taste. The maze at Hampton Court still existed 
in Walpole's time (1770). 



The Landscape Toets. 121 

*' His gardens next your admiration call, 
On every side you look, behold the wall ! 
No pleasing intricacies intervene, 
No artful wildness to perplex the scene ; 
Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother, 
And half the platform just reflects the other. 
The suffering eye inverted nature sees, 
Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees ; 
With here a fountain, never to be played ; 
And there a summer house, that knows no shade ; 
Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers ; 
There gladiators fight, or die in flowers ; 
Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn, 
And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn." 

Still the criticism is not merely fanciful which dis- 
covers an analogy between the French garden, with 
its trim regularity and artificial smoothness, and the 
couplets which Pope wrote: just such an analogy as 
exists between the whole classical school of poetry and 
the Italian architecture copied from Palladio and in- 
troduced in England by Inigo Jones and Christopher 
Wren. Grounds were laid out in rectangular plots, 
bordered by straight alleys, sometimes paved with 
vari-colored sand, and edged with formal hedges of 
box and holly. The turf was inlaid with parterres cut 
in geometric shapes and set, at even distances, with 
yew trees clipped into cubes, cones, pyramids, spheres, 
sometimes into figures of giants, birds, animals, and 
ships — called "topiary work" {optis topiariuni). Ter- 
races, fountains, bowling-greens (Fr. bouling7'in) 
statues, arcades, quincunxes, espaliers, and artificial 
mazes or labyrinths loaded the scene. The whole was 
inclosed by a wall, which shut the garden off from the 
surrounding country. 



122 c^ History of English Romanticism. 

** When a Frenchman reads of the Garden of Eden," 
says Horace Walpole, in his essay ** On Modern 
Gardening" (written in 1770, published in 1785), 
" I do not doubt but he concludes it was something 
approaching to that of Versailles, with clipped hedges, 
berceaux and trellis work. . . The measured walk, 
the quincunx and the etoile imposed their unsatisfying 
sameness on every royal and noble garden. . . Many 
French groves seem green chests set upon poles. . . 
In the garden of Marshal de Biron at Paris, consisting 
of fourteen acres, every walk is buttoned on each side 
by lines of flower-pots, which succeed in their seasons. 
When I saw it, there were nine thousand pots of asters, 
or la reine Marguerite. . . At Lady Or ford's, at 
Piddletown, in Dorsetshire, there was, when my 
brother married, a double enclosure of thirteen gar- 
dens, each I suppose not much above a hundred yards 
square, with an enfilade of correspondent gates; and 
before you arrived at these, you passed a narrow gut 
between two stone terraces that rose above your head, 
and which were crowned by a line of pyramidal yews. 
A bowling green was all the lawn admitted in those 
times: a circular lake the extent of magnificence."* 

Walpole names Theobalds and Nonsuch as famous 
examples of the old formal style of garden; Stour- 
\head, Hagley, and Stowe — the country seat of Lyttel- 
lon's brother-in-law, Lord Cobham — of the new. He 
says that mottoes and coats of arms were sometimes 
cut in yew, box, and holly. He refers with respect to 
a recent work by the Rev. Thomas Whately, or 

* It is worth noticing that Batty Langley, the abortive restorer of 
Gothic, also recommended the natural style of landscape gardening 
as early as 1728 in his " New Principles of Gardening." 



The Landscape Toets. 125 

Wheatley, "Observations on Modern Gardening," 
1770; and to a poem, then and still in manuscript, but 
passages of which are given by Amherst,* entitled 
''The Rise and Progress of the Present Taste in Plant- 
ing Parks, Pleasure Grounds, Gardens, etc. In a 
poetic epistle to Lord Viscount Irwin," 1767. 

Gray's friend and editor, the Rev. William Mason, J 
in his poem "The English Garden," 1757, speaks of' 
the French garden as already a thing of the past. 

" O how unlike the scene my fancy forms, 
Did Folly, heretofore, with Wealth conspire 
To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene 
Which once was called a garden ! Britain still 
Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound 
Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid 
From geometric skill, they vainly strove 
By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears 
To form with verdure what the builder formed 
With stone. . . 

Hence the sidelong walls 
Of shaven yew ; the holly's prickly arms 
Trimmed into high arcades ; the tonsile box, 
Wove in mosaic mode of many a curl 
Around the figured carpet of the lawn. . . 
The terrace mound uplifted ; the long line 
Deep delved of flat canal." f 

But now, continues the poet. Taste "exalts her voice " 
and 

"At the awful sound 
The terrace sinks spontaneous ; on the green, 
Broidered with crisped knots, the tonsile yews 
Wither and fall ; the fountain dares no more 
To fling its wasted crystal through the sky. 
But pours salubrious o'er the parched lawn." 

* " History of Gardening in England.'* 
1 1. 3S4— 404. 



124 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

The new school had the intolerance of reformers.' 
The ruthless Capability Brown and his myrmidons 
laid waste many a prim but lovely old garden, with 
its avenues, terraces, and sun dials, the loss of which 
is deeply deplored, now that the Queen Anne revival 
has taught us to relish the rococo beauties which 
Brown's imitation landscapes displaced. 

We may pause for a little upon this "English 
Garden " of Mason's, as an example of that brood of \ 
didactic blank-verse poems, begotten of Philips' 
** Cyder "and Thomson's ** Seasons," which includes 
Mallet's *' Excursion " (1728), Somerville's "Chase" 
(1734), Akenside's " Pleasures of Imagination " (1742- 
44), Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health " (1744), 
Dyer's "Fleece" (1757) and Grainger's "Sugar 
Cane" (1764). Mason's blank verse, like Mallet's, is < 
closely imitative of Thomson's, and the influence of 
Thomson's inflated diction is here seen at its worst. 
The whole poem is an object lesson on the absurdity of 
didactic poetry. Especially harrowing are the author's 
struggles to be poetic while describing the various kinds 
of fences designed to keep sheep out of his inclosures. 



" Ingrateful sure, 
When such the theme, becomes the poet's task : 
Yet must he try by modulation meet 
Of varied cadence and selected phrase 
Exact yet free, without inflation bold, 
To dignify that theme." 

Accordingly he dignifies his theme by speaking of a 
net as the "sportsman's hempen toils," and of a gun as 

^^^ " —fell tube 

Whose iron entrails hide the sulphurous blast, 
Satanic engine ! " 



7he Landscape 'Poets. 125 

When he names an ice-house^ it is under a form of 
conundrum: 

" — the structure rude where Winter pounds, 
In conic pit his congelations hoar, 
That Summer may his tepid beverage cool 
With the chill luxury." 

This species of verbiage is the earmark of all 
eighteenth-century poetry ^nd poets; not only of those 
who used the classic couplet, but equally of the 
romanticizing group who adopted blank verse. The 
best of them are not free from it, not even Gray, not 
even Collins; and it pervades Wordsworth's earliest 
verses, his *' Descriptive Sketches" and *' Evening 
Walk " published in 1793. But perhaps the very worst 
instance of it is in Dr. Armstrong's ** Economy of 
Love," where the ludicrous contrast between the 
impropriety of the subject and the solemn pomp of the 
diction amounts almost to bouffe. 

In emulation of **The Seasons" Mason introduced ai 
sentimental love story — Alcander and Nerina — intohisl 
third book. He informs his readers (book II. 34-78) 
that, in the reaction agai nst st raight alleys, many 
gardeners had gone to an extreme in the use of zigzag 
meanders; and he recommends them to follow the 
natural curves of the footpaths which the milkmaid 
wears across the pastures ''from stile to stile," or 

which » 

— " the scudding hare 
Draws to her dew-sprent seat o'er thymy heaths." 

The prose commentary on Mason's poem, by W. 
Burgh,* asserts that the formal style of garden had 

* •' The Works of William Mason," in 4 vols., London, 1811. 



126 c/f History of English Romanticism. 

begun to give way about the commencement of the 
eighteenth century, though the new fashion had but 
very lately attained to its perfection. Mason mentions 
Pope as a champion of the true taste,* but the descrip- 
tions of his famous villa at Twickenham, with its 
grotto, thickets, and artificial mounds, hardly suggest 
to the modern reader a very "successful attempt to 
reproduce nature. To be sure. Pope had only five 

* See Pope's paper in the Guardian (ly 2) for some rather elaborate 
foolery about topiary work. " All art," he maintains, *' consists in 
the imitation and study of nature." "We seem to make it our 
study to recede from nature, not only in the various tonsure of greens 
into the most regular and formal shapes, but," etc., etc. Addison, 
too, Spectator 414, June 25, 1712, upholds " the rough, careless 
strokes of nature " against " the nice touches and embellishments of 
art," and complains that " our British gardeners, instead of humor- 
ing nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees 
rise in cones, globes and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors 
upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in 
my opinion, but for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in 
all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when 
it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure." See also 
Spectator, 477, for a pretty scheme of a garden laid out with 
" the beautiful wildness of nature." Gilbert West's Spenserian 
poem " Education," 1751 (see ante, p. 90), contains an attack, in six 
stanzas, upon the geometric garden, from which I give a single 
stanza. 
\^ ' ' Alse other wonders of the sportive shears. 

Fair nature mis-adorning, there were found : 

Globes, spiral columns, pyramids and piers, 

With sprouting urns and budding statues crowned ; 

And horizontal dials on the ground, 

In living box by cunning artists traced ; 

And gallies trim, on no long voyage bound, 

But by their roots there ever anchored fast. 

All were their bellying sails out-spread to every blast." 



The Landscape Toets. 127 

acres to experiment with, and that parklike scenery 
which distinguishes the English landscape garden 
requires a good deal of room. The art is the natural 
growth of a country where primogeniture has kept 
large estates in the hands of the nobility and landed 
gentry, and in which a passion for sport has kept the 
nobility and gentry in the country a great share of the 
year. Even Shenstone — whose place is commended by 
Mason — Shenstone at^tfce- Leasowes, with his three 
hundred acres, felt his little pleasance rather awkwardly 
dwarfed by the neighborhood of L^^telton's big park 
at Hagley. 

The general principle of the new or English school • 
was to imitate nature; to let trees keep their owrJ/ 
shapes, to substitute winding walks for straight alleys// 
and natural waterfalls or rapids ior jets d'eau in marble 
basins. The plan upon which Shenstone worked is 
explained in his *' Unconnected Thoughts on GardenX 
ing " * (1764), a few sentences from which will indicate * 
the direction of the reform: ''Landscape should con- 
tain variety enough to form a picture upon canvas; 
and this is no bad test, as I think the landscape painter 
is the gardener's best designer. The eye requires a 
sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon 
probable nature. A wood or hill may balance a house 
or obelisk; for exactness would be displeasing. . . 
It is not easy to account for the fondness of former 
times for straight-lined avenues to their houses; 
straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in 
short, every kind of straight line, where the foot has 
to travel over what the eye has done before. . . To 

* " Essays on Men and Manners," Shenstone's Works, Vol, II., 
Dodsley's edition. 



128 fiA History of English %omanticism. 

stand still and survey such avenues may afford some 
slender satisfaction, through the change derived from 
perspective; but to move on continually and find no 
change of scene in the least attendant on our change 
of place, must give actual pain to a person of taste. . . 
I conceived some idea of the sensation he must feel 
from walking but a few minutes, immured between 

Lord D 's high shorn yew hedges, which run exactly 

parallel at the distance of about ten feet, and are 
contrived perfectly to exclude all kind of objects 
whatsoever. . . The side trees in vistas should be so 
circumstanced as to afford a probability that they grew 
by nature. . . The shape of ground, the disposition of 
trees and the figure of water must be sacred to nature; 
and no forms must be allowed that make a discovery 
of art. . . The taste of the citizen and of the mere 
peasant are in all respects the same: the former gilds 
his balls, paints his stonework and statues white, plants 
his trees in lines or circles, cuts his yew-trees four- 
square or conic, or gives them what he can of the 
resemblance of birds or bears or men: squirts up his 
rivulets in Jets d'eau; in short, admires no part of 
nature but her ductility; exhibits everything that is 
glaring, that implies expense, or that effects a surprise 
because it is unnatural. The peasant is his admirer. . . 
Water should ever appear as an irregular lake or wind- 
ing stream. . . Hedges, appearing as such, are univer- 
sally bad. They discover art in nature's province." 

There is surely a correspondence between this new 
taste for picturesque gardening which preferred free- 
dom, variety, irregularity, and naturalness to rule, 
monotony, uniformity, and artifice, and that new taste 
in literature which discarded the couplet for blank 



The Landscape Toets. 129 

verse, or for various stanza forms, which left the 
world of society for the solitudes of nature, and ulti- 
mately went, in search of fresh stimulus, to the 
remains of the Gothic ages and the rude fragments of 
Norse and Celtic antiquity. 

Both Walpole and Mason speak of William Kent,l 
the architect and landscape painter, as influential in 
introducing a purer taste in the gardener's art. Kent 
was a friend of Pope and 2i protege oi Lord Burlington 
to whom Pope inscribed his *' Epistle on the Use of 
Riches," already quoted (see ante p. 121), and who 
gave Kent a home at his country house. Kent is said 
to have acknowledged that he caught his taste in gar- 
dening from the descriptive passages in Spenser, 
whose poems he illustrated. Walpole and Mason also 
unite in contrasting with the artificial gardening of 
Milton's time the picture of Eden in ** Paradise 
Lost:" 

" — where not nice art in curious knots, 
But nature boon poured forth on hill and dale 
Flowers worthy of Paradise ; while all around 
Umbrageous grots, and caves of cool recess, 
And murmuring waters, down the slope dispersed, 
Or held by fringed banks in crystal lakes. 
Compose a rural seat of various hue." 

But it is worth noting that in <*L* Allegro" ** retired 
leisure," takes his pleasure in ^^ trim gardens," while 
in Collins, 

" Ease and health retire 
To breezy lawn or forest deep." 

Walpole says that Kent's '* ruling principle was that \ 
nature abhors a straight line." Kent *' leaped the* 
fence and saw that all nature was a garden. He felt 



130 ^ Histoiy of English 'Romanticism. 

the delicious contrast of hill and valley, changing 
imperceptibly into each other . . . and remarked 
how loose groves crowned an easy eminence with 
happy ornament. . . The great principles on which 
ihe worked were perspective and light and shade. . . 
But of all the beauties he added to the face of this 
beautiful country, none surpassed his management of 
water. Adieu to canals, circular basins, and cascades 
tumbling down marble steps. . , The gentle stream 
was taught to serpentine seemingly at its pleasure." * 
The treatment of the garden as a part of the landscape 
in general was commonly accomplished by the removal 
of walls, hedges, and other inclosures, and the substi- 
tution of the ha-ha or sunken fence. It is odd that 
Walpole, though he speaks of Capability Brown, 
makes no mention of the Leasowes, whose proprietor, 
William Shenstone, the author of **The School- 
Imistress," is one of the most interesting of amateur 
gardeners. '* England," says Hugh Miller, *'has pro-, 
duced many greater poets than Shenstone, but she 
never produced a greater landscape gardener." 
V At Oxford, Shenstone had signalized his natural 
tastes by wearing his own hair instead of the wig then 
(1732) universally the fashion, f On coming of age, 
he inherited a Shropshire farm, called the Leasowes, 
in the parish of Hales Owen and an annuity of some 
three hundred pounds. He was of an indolent, retir- 
ing, and somewhat melancholy temperament; and, 
instead of pursuing a professional career, he settled 
down upon his property and, about the year 1745, 

**'On Modern Gardening," Works of the Earl of Orford, 
London, 1798, Vol. II. 

f Graves, " Recollections of Shenstone," 1788. 



The Landscape Toets, 131 

began to turn it into d^ferme orne'e. There he wooed 
the rustic muse in elegy, ode, and pastoral ball:id,\ 
sounding upon the vocal reed the beauties of simplicit)n 
and the vanity of ambition, and mingling with these 
strains complaints of Delia's cruelty and of the short- 
ness of his own purse, which hampered him seriously 
in his gardening designs. Mr. Saintsbury has de- 
scribed Shenstone as a master of '' the artificial-natural 
style in poetry."* His pastoral insipidities about 
pipes and crooks and kids, Damon and Delia, Strephon 
and Chloe, excited the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who was 
also at no pains to conceal his contempt for the poet's 
tiorticultural pursuits. "Whether to plant a walk in 
andulating curves and to place a bench at every turn 
where there is an object to catch the view; to make 
water run where it will be heard, and to stagnate 
where it will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye 
will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where 
there is something to be hidden, demands any great 
powers of mind, I will not enquire." The doctor 
reports that Lyttelton was jealous of the fame which 
the Leasowes soon acquired, and that when visitors to 
Hagley asked to see Shenstone's place, their host 
would adroitly conduct them to inconvenient points 
3f view — introducing them, e. g., at the wrong end of 
1 walk, so as to detect a deception in perspective, 
** injuries of which Shenstone would heavily com- 
plain." f Graves, however, denies that any rivalry 
was in question between the great domain of Hagley 
and the poet's little estate. "The truth of the case," 
tie writes, " was that the Lyttelton family went so fre- 

*" Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. 271. 
f " Life of Shenstone." 



132 zA History of English ^{omanticism. 

quently with their company to the Leasowes, that they 
were unwilling to break in upon Mr. Shenstone's retire- 
ment on every occasion, and therefore often went to 
the principal points of view, without waiting for any- 
one to conduct them regularly through the whole 
walks. Of this Mr. Shenstone would sometimes 
peevishly complain." 

Shenstone describes in his *' Thoughts on Garden- 
ing," several artifices that he put in practice for 
increasing the apparent distance of objects, or for 
I lengthening the perspective of an avenue by widening 
lit in the foreground and planting it there with dark- 
Vfoliaged trees, like yews and firs, *' then with trees 
more and more fady, till they end in the almond- 
willow or silver osier." To have Lord Lyttleton bring 
in a party at the small, or willow end of such a walk, 
and thereby spoil the whole trick, must indeed have 
been provoking. Johnson asserts that Shenstone's 
house was ruinous and that " nothing raised his indig- 
nation more than to ask if there were any fishes in his 
water." **In time," continues the doctor, *'his ex- 
penses brought clamors about him that overpowered 
the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his groves 
were haunted by beings very different from fawns and 
fairies; " to wit, bailiffs; but Graves denies this. 

The fame of the Leasowes attracted visitors from 
all parts of the countf3f=^literary men like Spence, 
Home, and Dodsley: picturesque tourists, who came 
out of curiosity; and titled persons, who came, or 
sent their gardeners, to obtain hints for laying out 
their own grounds. Lyttelton brought William Pitt, 
who was so much interested that he offered to con- 
tribute two hundred pounds toward improvements, 



The Landscape T^oets. 133 

an offer that Shenstone, however, declined. Pitt had 
himself some skill in landscape gardening, which he 
exercised at Enfield Chase and afterward at Hayes.* 
Thomson, who was Lyttelton's guest at Ha^ley every 
summer during the last three or four years of his life, 
was naturally familiar with the Leasowes. There are 
many references to the ** sweet descriptive bard," in 
Shenstone's poems f and a seat was inscribed to his 
memory in a part of the grounds known as Vergil's 
Grove. ** This seat," says Dodsley, **is placed upon a 
steep bank on the edge of the valley, from which the 
eye is here drawn down into the flat below by the 
light that glimmers in front and by the sound of vari- 
ous cascades, by which the winding stream is agreeably 
broken. Opposite to this seat the ground rises again 
in an easy concave to a kind of dripping fountain, 
where a small rill trickles down a rude niche of rock 
work through fern, liverwort, and aquatic weeds. . . 
The whole scene is opaque and gloomy." J 

English landscape gardening is a noble art. Its 

*See ante, p. 90, for his visits to Gilbert West at Wickham. 

f See especially " A Pastoral Ode," and " Verses Written toward 
the Close of the Year 1748." 

^ " A Description of the Leasowes by R. Dodsley," Shenstone's 
Works, Vol. II. pp. 287-320 (3d ed.) This description is accom- 
panied with a map. For other descriptions consult Graves' " Recol- 
lections," Hugh Miller's " First Impressions of England," and Wm, 
Howitt's •' Homes of the Poets" (1846), Vol. I. pp. 258-63. The 
last gives an engraving of the house and grounds. Miller, who was 
at Hagley — " The British Tempe" — and the Leasowes just a century 
after Shenstone began to embellish his paternal acres, says that the 
Leasowes was the poet's most elaborate poem, "the singularly 
ingenious composition, inscribed on an English hillside, which em- 
ployed for twenty long years the taste and genius of Shenstone." 



134 ^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

principles are sound and of perpetual application. 
Yet we have advanced so much farther in the passion 
for nature than the men of Shenstone's day that we 
are apt to be impatient of the degree of artifice present 
in even the most skillful counterfeit of the natural 
landscape. The poet no longer writes odes on *' Rural 
Elegance," nor sings 

" The transport, most allied to song, 

In some fair valley's peaceful bound 
To catch soft hints from Nature's tongue, 

And bid Arcadia bloom around ; 
Whether we fringe the sloping hill, 

Or smooth below the verdant mead ; 
Whether we break the falling rill, 

Or through meandering mazes lead, 
Or in the horrid brambles' room 

Bid careless groups of roses bloom ; 
Or let some sheltered lake serene 

Reflect flowers, woods and spires, and brighten all the 
scene." 

If we cannot have the mountains, the primeval for- 
est, or the shore of the wild sea, we can at least have 
Thomson's ** great simple country," subdued to man's 
use but not to his pleasure. The modern mood pre- 
fers a lane to a winding avenue, and an old orchard or 
^ stony pasture to a lawn decorated with coppices. *'I 
, do confess," says Howitt, "that in the * Leasowes ' I 
^have always found so much ado about nothing; such a 
parade of miniature cascades, lakes, streams conveyed 
hither and thither; surprises in the disposition of 
woods and the turn of walks . . . that I have heartily 
wished myself out upon a good rough heath." 

For the ** artificial-natural " was a trait of Shen- 



The Landscape Toets, 135 

stone's gardening no less than of his poetry. He 
closed every vista and emphasized every opening in 
his shubberies and every spot that commanded a pros- 
spect with some object which was as an exclamation 
point on the beauty of the scene: a rustic bench, a 
root-house, a Gothic alcove, a grotto, a hermitage, a 
memorial urn or obelisk dedicated to Lyttelton, Thom- 
son, Somerville,* Dodsley, or some other friend. He 
supplied these with inscriptions expressive of the sen- 
timents appropriate to the spot, passages from Vergil, 
or English or Latin verses of his own composition. 
Walpole says that Kent went so far in his imitation 
of natural scenery as to plant dead trees in Kensing-| 
ton Garden. Walpole himself seems to approve of 
such devices as artificial ruins, '*a feigned steeple of a 
distant church or an unreal bridge to disguise the ter- 
mination of water." Shenstone was not above these 
little effects: he constructed a " ruinated priory " and 
a temple of Pan out of rough, unhewn stone; he put up 
a statue of a piping faun, and another of the Venus dei 
Medici beside a vase of gold fishes. 

Some of Shenstone's inscriptions have escaped the 
tooth of time. The motto, for instance, cut upon the 
urn consecrated to the memory of his cousin, Miss 
Dolman, was prefixed by Byron to his "Elegy upon 
Thyrza " : ** Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari 
quam tui meminisse!" The habit of inscription pre- 
vailed down to the time of Wordsworth, who composed 
a number for the grounds of Sir George Beaumont at 

* See " Lady Luxborough's Letters to Shenstone," 1775, for a long 
correspondence about an urn which she was erecting to Somerville's 
memory. She was a sister of Bolingbroke, had a seat at Barrels, and 
exchanged visits with Shenstone. 



136 <t/^ History of English ^manticism. 

Coleorton. One of Akenside's best pieces is his 
*' Inscription for a Grotto," which is not unworthy 
of Landor. Matthew Green, the author of ''The 
Spleen," wrote a poem of some 250 lines upon Queen 
Caroline's celebrated grotto in Richmond Garden. 
*' A grotto," says Johnson, apropos of that still more 
celebrated one at Pope's Twickenham villa, *' is not 
often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has 
more frequent need to solicit than exclude the 
sun"; but the increasing prominence of the mossy 
cave and hermit's cell, both in descriptive verse and in 
ardening, was symptomatic. It was a note of the 
coming romanticism, and of that pensive, elegiac strain 
which we shall encounter in the work of Gray, Collins, 
and the Wartons. It marked the withdrawal of the 
Eiuae— ix,om the world's high places into the cool 
Ijequestered vale of life. All through the literature of 
the mid-century, the high-strung ear may catch the drip- 
drip of spring water down the rocky walls of the grot. 
At Hagley, halfway up the hillside. Miller saw 
a semi-octagonal temple dedicated to the genius of 
Thomson. It stood in a grassy hollow which com- 
manded a vast, open prospect and was a favorite rest- 
ing place of the poet of "The Seasons." In a shady, 
secluded ravine he found a white pedestal, topped by 
an urn which Lyttelton had inscribed to the memory 
of Shenstone. This contrast of situation seemed to 
the tourist emblematic. Shenstone, he says, was an 
egotist, and his recess, true to his character, excludes 
the distant landscape. Gray, who pronounced "The 
Schoolmistress " a masterpiece in its kind, made a 
rather slighting mention of its author.* " I have read 
* " Letter to Nichols," June 24, 1769. 



The Landscape l^oets. 137 

an 8vo volume of Shenstone's letters; poor man! he 
was always wishing for money, for fame and other dis- 
tinctions; and his whole philosophy consisted in living, 
against his will, in retirement and in a place which his 
taste had adorned, but which he only enjoyed when 
people of note came to see and commend it." Gray 
unquestionably profited by a reading of Shenstone's 
*' Elegies," which antedate his own *' Elegy Written in 
a Country Churchyard" (1751). He adopted Shen- 
stone's stanza, which Shenstone had borrowed from 
the love elegies of a now forgotten poet, James Ham-^ 
mond, equerry to Prince Frederick and a friend of Cob- 
ham, Lyttelton, and Chesterfield. *'Why Hammond 
or other writers," says Johnson, ** have thought the 
quatrain of ten syllables elegiac, it is difficult to tell. 
The character of the elegy is gentleness and tenuity, 
but this stanza has been pronounced by Dryden . . . 
to be the most magnificent of all the measures which 
our language affords." * 

*Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis," Davenant's " Gondibert," and Sir 
John Davies' " Nosce Teipsum" were written in this stanza, but the 
universal currency of Gray's poem associated it for many years almost 
exclusively with elegiac poetry. Shenstone's collected poems were 
not published till 1764, though some of them had been printed in 
Dodsley's " Miscellanies." Only a few of his elegies are dated in the 
collected editions (Elegy VIII, 1745 ; XIX, 1743 ; XXI, 1746), but 
Graves says that they were all written before Gray's. The following 
lines will recall to every reader corresponding passages in Gray's 
" Churchyard " : 

" O foolish muses, that with zeal aspire 

To deck the cold insensate shrine with bays ! 

" When the free spirit quits her humble frame 

To tread the skies, with radiant garlands crowned ; 



138 tA History of English l^manticism. 

Next after *'The Schoolmistress," the most engag- 
ing of Shenstone's poems is his ** Pastoral Ballad,'* 
written in 1743 in four parts and in a tripping ana- 
pestic measure. Familiar to most readers is the 
stanza beginning: 

" I have found out a gift for my fair, 
I have found where the wood-pigeons breed." 

Dr. Johnson acknowledged the prettiness of the 
conceit: 

'* So sweetly she bade me adieu, 
I thought that she bade me return; " 

and he used to quote and commend the well-known 
lines ** Written at an Inn at Henley: 

*' Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, 
"Where'er his stages may have been, 
May sigh to think he still has found 
The warmest welcome at an inn." 

As to Shenstone's blank verse — of which there is not 
much — the doctor says: "His blank verses, those 

Say, will she hear the distant voice of Fame, 
Or hearing, fancy sweetness in the sound ? " 

—£:iegy II. 

*' I saw his bier ignobly cross the plain." 

—Elegy III. 

" No wild ambition fired their spotless breast." 

— Elegy y.V. 

" Through the dim veil of evening's dusky shade 
Near some lone fane or yew's funereal green," etc. 

—Elegy IV. 
** The glimmering twilight and the doubtful dawn 
Shall see your step to these sad scenes return, 
Constant as crystal dews impearl the lawn," etc. 

—Ibid. 



7 he Landscape Toets. 139 

that can read them may probably find to be like the 
blank verses of his neighbors." Shenstone encour- 
aged Percy to publish his ** Reliques." The plans for 
the grounds at Abbotsford were somewhat influenced 
by Dodsley's description of the Leasowes, which 
Scott studied with great interest. 

In 1744 Mark Akenside, a north country man and 
educated partly in Scotland, published his '* Pleasures 
of Imagination," afterwards rewritten as " The Pleas- 
ures of the Imagination " and spoiled in the process. 
The title and something of the course of thought in 
the poem were taken from Addison's series of papers 
on the subject {Spectator^ Nos. 41 1-42 1). Akenside 
was a man of learning and a physician of distinction. 
His poem, printed when he was only twenty-three, 
enjoyed a popularity now rather hard to account for. 
Gray complained of its obscurity and said it was issued 
nine years too early, but admitted that now and then 
it rose *' even, to the best, particularly in description." 
Akenside was harsh, formal, and dogmatic, as a man. 
Smollett caricatured him in "Peregrine Pickle," 
Johnson hated his Whig principles and represents him, 
when settled at Northampton, as "having deafened 
the place with clamors for liberty." * He furthermore 
disliked the class of poetry to which Akenside's work 
belonged, and he told Boswell that he couldn't read 
it. Still he speaks of him with a certain cautious! 
respect, which seems rather a concession to con-l 
temporary opinion than an appreciation of the critic's^ 
own. He even acknowledges that Akenside has 
** fewer artifices of disgust than most of his brethren 
of the blank song." Lowell says that the very title 
of Akenside's poem pointed "away from the level 

* " Life of Akenside." 



140 zA History of English Romanticism. 

highway of commonplace to mountain paths and less 
domestic prospects. The poem was stiff and unwill- 
ing, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births. 
Without it, the * Lines Written at Tintern Abbey* 
might never have been." 

One cannot read **The Pleasures of Imagina- 
tion "without becoming sensible that the writer was 
possessed of poetic feeling, and feeling of a kind that 
we generally agree to call romantic. His doctrine at 
least, if not his practice, was in harmony with the 
fresh impulse which was coming into English poetry. 
Thus he celebrates heaven-born genius and the in- 
spiration of nature, and decries ''the critic-verse" 
and the effort to scale Parnassus **bydull obedience. 'l 
He invokes the peculiar muse of the new school: 

" Indulgent Fancy ^ from the fruitful banks 
Of Avon, whence thy rosy fingers cull 
Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf 
Where Shakspere lies." 

But Akenside is too abstract. In place of images, • 
he presents the reader with dissertations. A poem 
which takes imagination as its subject rather than 
! its method will inevitably remain, not poetry but a 
[lecture on poetry — a theory of beauty, not an example 
of it. Akenside might have chosen for his motto 
Milton's lines: 

" How charming is divine philosophy ! 
f Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, 

But musical as is Apollo's lute." 

Yet he might have remembered, too, what Milton said 
about the duty of poetry to be simple, sensuous, and 
passionate. Akenside's is nothing of these; it is, on 



The Landscape T^oets. 141 

the contrary obscure, metaphysical, and, as a conse- \ 
quence, frigid. Following Addison, he names great- 
ness and novelty, /. e., the sublime and the wonderful, 
as, equally with beauty, the chief sources of imagina- 
tive pleasure, and the whole poem is a plea for what 
we are now accustomed to call the ideal. In the first 
book there is a passage which is fine in spirit and — 
though in a less degree — in expression: 

" Who that from Alpine heights his laboring eye 
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey 
Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave 

Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade. 
And continents of sand, will turn his gaze 
To mark the windings of a scanty rill 
That murmurs at his feet ? The high-born soul 
Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing 
Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth 
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft 
Through fields of air ; pursues the flying storm ; 
Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens ; 
Or, yoked with whirlwinos and the northern blast, 
Sweeps the long tract of Cay." 

The hint for this passage was furnished by a paragraph 
in Addison's second paper {Spectator, 412) and the 
emotion is the same to which Goethe gives utterance 
in the well-known lines of *' Faust": 

" Doch jedem ist es eingeboren 
Dass sein Geflihl hinauf und vorwarts dringt," etc. 

But how greatly superior in sharpness of detail, rich- 
ness of invention, energy of movement is the German 
to the English poet! 

Akenside ranks among the earlier Spenserians by 
virtue of his "Virtuoso" (1737) and of several odes \ 



142 c^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

composed in a ten-lined variation on Spenser's stanza. 
A collection of his "Odes" appeared in 1745 — the 
year before Collins' and Joseph Warton's — and a 
second in 1760. They are of little value, but show 
here and there traces of Milton's minor poetry and 
jthat elegiac sentiment, common to the lyrical verse of 
the time, noticeable particularly in a passage on the 
nightingale in Ode XV. book i., " To the Evening Star." 
"The Pleasures of Imagination " was the parent of a 
numerous offspring of similarly entitled pieces, among 
which are Joseph Warton's " Pleasures of Melan- 
choly," Campbell's " Pleasures of Hope," and Rogers' 
"Pleasures of Memory." 

In the same year with Thomson's "Winter" (1726) 
there were published in two poetical miscellanies a pair 
of little descriptive pieces, "Grongar Hill" and 
"The Country Walk," written by John Dyer, a young 
Welshman, in the octosyllabic couplet of Milton's 
V L'Allegro " and " II Pensoroso." ("Grongar Hill," 
as first printed was a sort of irregular ode with alter- 
nate rhyming; but it was much improved in later edi- 
tions, and rewritten throughout in couplets.) 

Dyer was a landscape painter who had been educated 
at Westminster school, studied under Richardson at 
London, and spent some time wandering about the 
mountains of Wales in the practice of his art. 
"Grongar Hill " is, in fact, a pictorial poem, a sketch 
of the landscape seen from the top of his favorite 
summit in South Wales. It is a slight piece of work, 
careless and even slovenly in execution, but with an 
ease and lightness of touch that contrast pleasantly 
with Thomson's and Akenside's ponderosity. When 
^Dyer wrote blank verse he slipped into the Thom- 



The Landscape Toets. 143 

sonian diction, *'cumbent sheep" and ''purple groves 
pomaceous." But in ''Grongar Hill" — although he 
does call the sun Phoebus — the shorter measure seems 
to bring shorter words, and he has lines of Words- 
worthian simplicity — 

" The woody valleys warm and low, \ 
The windy summit, wild and high:" 

or the closing passage, which Wordsworth alludes to 
in his sonnet on Dyer — ''Long as the thrush shall pipe 
on Grongar Hill " : 

*' Grass and flowers Quiet treads 

On the meads and mountain heads. . . 
And often, by the murmuring rill. 
Hears the thrush while all is still, 
Within the groves of Grongar Hill." 

Wordsworth was attracted by Dyer's love of "moun- 
tain turf" and "spacious airy downs " and "naked 
Snowdon's wide, aerial waste." The "power of hills" 
was on him. Like Wordsworth, too, he moralized his 
song. In "Grongar Hill,''\jthe ruined tower suggests 
the transience of human lif?: the rivers running down 
to the sea are likened to man's career from birth to 
death; and Campbell's couplet, 

" 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view 
And robes the mountain in its azure hue,"* 

is thought to owe something to Dyer's 

"As yon summits soft and fair, 
Clad in colors of the air, 
Which to those who journey near 
Barren, brown and rough appear, 
Still we tread the same coarse way, 
The present's still a cloudy day." 

* " Pleasures of Hope." 



144 <^ History of English l{omanticisin. 

Dyer went to Rome to pursue his art studies and, on 
his return in 1740, published his ** Ruins of Rom^)[^in 
blank verse. He was not very successful as a painter, 
and finally took orders, married, and settled down as 
a country parson. In 1757 he published his most 
ambitious work, ''The Fleece,'<a poem in blank verse 
and in four books, descriptive of English wool-grow- 
ing. "The subject of 'The Fleece,' sir," pronounced 
Johnson, "cannot be made poetical. How can a man 
write poetically of serges and druggets? " Didactic 
poetry, in truth, leads too often to ludicrous descents. 
Such precepts as " beware the rot," " enclose, enclose^ 
ye swains," and 

"—the utility of salt 
Teach thy slow swains " ; 

with prescriptions for the scab, and advice as to divers 
kinds of wool combs, are fatal. A poem of this class 
has to be made poetical, by dragging in episodes and 
digressions which do not inhere in the subject itself 
but are artificially associated with it. Of such a 
nature is the loving mention — quoted in Wordsworth's 
sonnet — of the poet's native Carmarthenshire 

" — that soft tract 
Of Cambria, deep embayed, Dimetian land, 
By green hills fenced, by Ocean's murmur lulled." 

Lowell admired the line about the Siberian exiles, met 

" On the dark level of adversity." 

.^iltonic reminiscences are frequent in Dyer. Sabrina 
is borrowed from "Comus"; "bosky bourn" and 
"soothest shepherd" from the same; "the light 
fantastic toe " from "L'Allegro"; "level brine" and 



The Landscape Toets. 145 

*'nor taint-worm shall infect the yeaning herds," from 
^'Lycidas"; ''audience pure be thy delight, though 
few," from "Paradise Lost." 

"Mr. Dyer," wrote Gray to Horace Walpole in 
1751, "has more of poetry in his imagination than 
almost any of our number; but rough and injudicious." 
Akenside, who helped Dyer polish the manuscript of 
"The Fleece," said that "he would regulate his 
opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer's 
'Fleece'; for if that w^ere ill received, he should not 
think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from 
excellence." The romantic element in Dyer's imagi- 
nation appears principally in his love of the mountains^ 
and of ancient ruins. Johnson cites with approval 
a sentence in "The Ruins of Rome": 

" At dead of night, 
The hermit oft, midst his orisons, hears 
Aghast the voice of Time disparting towers." * 

These were classic ruins. Perhaps the doctor's 
sympathy would not have been so quickly extended 
to the picture of the moldering Gothic tower in 
"Grongar Hill," or of "solitary Stonehenge gray 
with moss," in "The Fleece." 

* Cf. Wordsworth's 

' ' Some casual shout that broke the silent air, 
Or the unimaginable touch of time." 

^Mutability : Ecclesiastical Sennets, XXXIV. 



CHAPTER V. 
XLbc /Qbtltonfc (3roup» 

That the influence of Milton, in the romantic 
revival of the eighteenth century, should have been 
hardly second in importance to Spenser's is a con- 
firmation of our remark that Augustan literature was 
** classical " in a way of its own. It is another example 
*of that curiously topsy-turvy condition of things in 
which rhyme was a mark of the classic, and blank verse 
of the romantic. For Milton is the most truly clas- 
sical of English poets; and yet, from the angle of 
observation at which the eighteenth century viewed 
him, he appeared a romantic. It was upon his 
romantic side, at all events, that the new school of 
poets apprehended and appropriated him. 

This side was present in Milton in a fuller measure 
than his completed works would show. It is well 
known that he, at one time, had projected an 
Arthuriad, a design which, if carried out, might have 
anticipated Tennyson and so deprived us of **The 
Idyls of the King." ''I betook me," he writes, *'among 
those lofty fables and romances which recount in 
solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood."* And in the 
*'Epitaphium Damonis " he thus apprises the reader 
of his purpose: 

Ipse ego Dardanias Rutupina per sequora puppes, 
Dicam,et Pandrasidos regnum vetus Inogeniae, 
* " An Apology for Smectymnuus." 
146 



The zMiltonic Group. i47 

Brennumque Arviragumque duces, priscumque Belinum, 
Et tandem Armoricos Britonum sub lege colonos ; 
Turn gravidam Arturo fatali fraude lorgernen ; 
Mendaces vultus, assumptaque Gorlois arma, 
Merlini dolus."* 

The *' matter of Britain" never quite lost the fasci- 
nation which it had exercised over his youthful 
imagination, as appears from passages in *' Paradise 
Lost"f and even in ** Paradise Regained." J But 
with his increasing austerity, both religious and 
literary, Milton gravitated finally to Hebraic themes 
and Hellenic art forms. He wrote Homeric epics and 
^schylean tragedies, instead of masques and sonnets, 
of rhymed pieces on the Italian model, like ** L'Allegro " 
and '* II Penseroso," and of stanzaic poems, like the 
** Nativity Ode," touched with Elizabethan conceits. 
He relied more and more upon sheer construction and 
weight of thought and less upon decorative richness of 
detail. His diction became naked and severe, and he 
employed rhyme but sparingly, even in the choral 

* Lines 162-168. See also " Mansus," 80-84. 
f " What resounds 
In fable or romance of Uther's son, 
Begirt with British and Armoric knights ; 
And all who since, baptized or infidel, 
Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, 
Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, 
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore 
"When Charlemain with all his peerage fell 
By Fontarabbia." 

—Book I. 579-587. 
X " Faery damsels met in forest wide 
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, 
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore." 

— Book II. 359-361. 



148 e/^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

parts of ''Samson Agonistes." In short, like Goethe^ 
he grew classical as he grew old. It has been 
'^ mentioned that "Paradise Lost" did much to 
, keep alive the tradition of English blank verse 
through a period remarkable for its bigoted devotion 
to rhyme, and especially to the heroic couplet. Yet it 
was, after all, Milton's early poetry, in which rhyme is 
used — though used so differently from the way in 
which Pope used it — that counted for most in the his- 
tory of the romantic movement. Professor Masson con- 
tradicts the common assertion, that ** Paradise Lost " 
was first written into popularity by Addison's Saturday 
papers. While that series was running, Tonson brought 
out (1711-13) an edition of Milton's poetical works 
which was **the ninth of * Paradise Lost,' the eighth 
of * Paradise Regained,' the seventh of * Samson 
Agonistes' and the sixth of the minor poems." The 
previous issues of the minor poems had been in 1645, 
1673, 1695, 1705, and 1707. Six editions in sixty- 
eight years is certainly no very great showing. After 
17 13 editions of Milton multiplied rapidly; by 1763 
*' Paradise Lost " was in its forty-sixth, and the minor 
poems in their thirtieth.* 

Addison selected an occasional passage from 
Milton's juvenile poems, in the Spectator; but from all 
obtainable evidence, it seems not doubtful that they 
had been comparatively neglected, and that, although 
reissued from time to time in complete editions oT 
Milton's poetry, they were regarded merely as pen- 
dents to *' Paradise Lost " and floated by its reputa- 
tion. ** Whatever causes," says Dryden, *' Milton 
alleges for the abolishing of rime . . . his own par- 
*" Masson's Life of Milton," Vol. VI. p. 789. 



The [Miltonic Group, 149 

ticular reason is plainly this, that rime was not his 
talent: he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the 
graces of it: which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia' or 
verses written in his youth; where his rime is always 
constrained and forced and comes hardly from him." 
Joseph Warton, writing in 1756,* after quoting 
copiously from the *' Nativity Ode," which, he says, is 
*'not sufficiently read nor admired," continues as 
follows: ''I have dwelt chiefly on this ode as much 
less celebrated than ' L'Allegro ' and * II Pen- 
seroso,* f which are now universally known; but 
which, by a strange fatality, lay in a sort of obscurity, 
the private enjoyment of a few curious readers, till they 
were set to admirable music by Mr. Handel. And 
indeed this volume of Milton's miscellaneous poems 

* " Essay on Pope," Vol. I. pp. 36-38 (5th edition). In the dedi- 
cation to Young, Warton says : " The Epistles [Pope's] on the 
Characters of Men and Women, and your sprightly Satires, my good 
friend, are more frequently perused and quoted than ' L'Allegro ' 
and * II Penseroso ' of Milton." 

f The Rev. Francis Peck, in his " New Memoirs of the Life and 
J'oetical Works of Mr. John Milton," in 1740, says that these two 
poems are Justly admired by foreigners as well as Englishmen, and 
have therefore been translated into all the modern languages. This 
volume contains, among other things, " An Examination of Milton's 
Style"; "Explanatory and Critical Notes on Divers Passages of 
Milton and Shakspere"; "The Resurrection," a blank verse imita- 
tion of Milton by " a friend of the editor's in London," with analyses 
of " Lycidas," " Comus," "L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso," and 
the " Nativity Ode." Peck defends Milton's rhymed poems against 
Dryden's strictures. " He was both a perfect master of rime and 
could also express something by it which nobody else ever thought 
of." He compares the verse paragraphs of " Lycidas " to musical 
bars and pronounces its system of "dispersed rimes" admirable and 
unique. 



150 <iA History of English l^omanticism, 

has not till very lately met with suitable regard. 
Shall I offend any rational admirer of Pope, by remark- 
ing that these juvenile descriptive poems of Milton, as 
well as his Latin elegies, are of a strain far more 
exalted than any the former author can boast?" 

The first critical edition of the minor poems was t 
published in 1785, by Thomas Warton, whose annota- 
tions have been of great service to all later editors. 
As late as 1779, Dr. Johnson spoke of these same 
poems with an absence of appreciation that now seems 
utterly astounding. ** Those who admire the beauties 
of this great poet sometimes force their own judg- 
ment into false admiration of his little pieces, and 
prevail upon themselves to think that admirable which 
is only singular." Of Lycidas he says: *' In this poem * 
there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no 
art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a 
pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting. . . 
Surely no man could have fancied that he read 
* Lycidas ' with pleasure, had he not known its 
author." He acknowledges that **L' Allegro" and 
"II Penseroso " are "noble efforts of imagination"; 
and that, " as a series of lines," " Comus " "may be 
considered as worthy of all the admiration with which 
the votaries have received it." But he makes peevish 
objections to its dramatic probability, finds its dia- 
logues and soliloquies tedious, and unmindful of the 
fate of Midas, solemnly pronounces the songs — 
"Sweet Echo "and " Sabrina fair " — "harsh in their 
diction and not very musical in their numbers"! Of 
the sonnets he says: " They deserve not any particu- 
lar criticism; for of the best it can only be said that 
they are not bad."* Boswell reports that, Hannah 
* " Life of Milton." 



7be O\iiltonic Grctip. 151 

More having expressed her ** wonder that the poet 
who had written 'Paradise Lost' should write such 
poor sonnets," Johnson replied: ''Milton, madam, 
was a genius that could cut a colossus from a rock, but 
could not carve heads upon cherry stones." 

The influence of Milton's minor poetry first becomes x 
noticeable in the fifth decade of the century, and in / 
the work of a new group of lyrical poets: Collins,/ 
Gray, Mason, and the brothers Joseph and Thomas! 
Warton. To all of these Milton was master. But just| 
as Thomson and Shenstone got original effects from I 
Spenser's stanza, while West and Cambridge and Lloyd 1 
were nothing but echoes; so Collins and Gray — 
immortal names — drew fresh music from Milton's 
organ pipes, while for the others he set the tune. 
The Wartons,- indeed, though imitative always in their 
verse, have an independent and not inconsiderable 
position in criticism and literary scholarship, and I 
shall return to them later in that connection. Mason, 
whose "English Garden" has been reviewed in 
chapter iv, was a very small poet and a somewhat 
absurd person. He aped, first Milton and afterward 
Gray, so closely that his work often seems like parody. 
In general the Miltonic revival made itself manifest 
in a more dispersed and indirect fashion than the 
Spenserian ; but there was no lack of formal imitations, 
also, and it will be advisable to notice a few of these 
here in the order of their dates. 

In 1740 Joseph Warton, then an Oxford under- 
graduate, wrote his blank-verse poem "The Enthu- 
siast, or the Lover of Nature." The work of a boy of 
eighteen, it had that instinct of the future, of the set 
of the literary current, not uncommon in youthful 



152 c^ History of English %omanticism. 

artists, of which Chatterton's precocious verses are a 
remarkable instance. Composed only ten years later 
than the completed ** Seasons," and five years before 
Shenstone began to lay out his miniature wildernesses 
at the Leasowes, it is more distinctly modern and 
romantic in its preference of wild nature to cultivated 
landscape, and of the literature of fancy to the litera- 
ture of reason. 

" What are the lays of artful Addison, 
Coldly correct, to Shakspere's warblings wild ? " 

asks the young enthusiast, in Milton's own phrase. 
And again 

*^Can Kent design like Nature? . . . 
Though he, by rules unfettered, boldly scorns 
Formality and method, round and square 
Disdaining, plans irregularly great ? . . . 

Versailles 
May boast a thousand fountains that can cast 
The tortured waters to the distant heavens ; 
Yet let me choose some pine-topped precipice 
Abrupt and shaggy, whence a foamy stream, 
Like Anio, tumbling roars ; or some black heath 
Where straggling stands the mournful juniper, 
Or yew tree scathed." 

The enthusiast haunts "dark forests" and loves to 
listen to *' hollow winds and ever-beating waves" and 
** sea-mew's clang." Milton appears at every turn, 
not only in single epithets like ** Lydian airs," 
*' the level brine," " low-thoughted cares," '* the light 
fantastic dance," but in the entire spirit, imagery, and 



The zMiltonic Group. 153 

diction of the poem. A few lines will illustrate this 
better than any description. 

" Ye green-robed Dryads, oft at dusky eve 
By wondering shepherds seen ; to forests brown, 
To unfrequented meads and pathless wilds 
Lead me from gardens decked with art's vain 

pomp. . . 
But let me never fail in cloudless night, 
When silent Cynthia in her silver car 
Through the blue concave slides, . . . 
To seek some level mead, and there invoke 
Old midnight's sister, contemplation sage 
(Queen of the rugged brow and stern-fixed eye), 
To lift my soul above this little earth, 
This folly-fettered world : to purge my ears, 
That I may hear the rolling planets' song 
And tuneful turning spheres." 

Mason's Miltonic imitations, **Musaeus," ** II Bel- 
licoso "and ** II Pacifico" were written in 1744 — accord- 
ing to the statement of their author, whose statements, 
however, are not always to be relied upon. The first 
was published in 1747; the second ** surreptitiously 
printed in a magazine and afterw^ard inserted in 
Pearch's miscellany," finally revised and published by 
the author in 1797; the third first printed in 1748 in 
the Cambridge verses on the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. 
These pieces follow copy in every particular. *' II 
Bellicoso," e. g.^ opens with the invocation. 

" Hence, dull lethargic Peace, 

Born in some hoary beadsman's cell obscure ! " 

The genealogies of Peace and War are recited, and 
contrasted pictures of peaceful and warlike pleasures 
presented in an order which corresponds as precisely 



154 €^ History of English 'T{omanticistn, 

as possible to Milton's in '*L' Allegro" and '*!] 
Penseroso." 

" Then, to unbend my mind, I'll roam 
Amid the cloister's silent gloom ; 
Or, where ranged oaks their shades diffuse, 
Hold dalliance with my darling Muse, 
Recalling oft some heaven-born strain 
That warbled in Augustan reign; 
Or turn, well pleased, the Grecian page, 
If sweet Theocritus engage, 
Or blithe Anacreon, mirthful wight, 
Carol his easy love-lay light . . . 
And joys like these, if Peace inspire, 
Peace, with thee I string the lyre." * 



**Musseus" was a monody on the death of Pope, 
employing the pastoral machinery and the varied 
irregular measure of **Lycidas." Chaucer, Spenser, 
and Milton, under the names of Tityrus, Colin Clout, 
and Thyrsis, are introduced as mourners, like Camus 
and St. Peter in the original. Tityrus is made to 
lament the dead shepherd in very incorrect Middle 
English. Colin Clout speaks two stanzas of the form 
used in the first eclogue of ** The Shepherd's Calendar," 
and three stanzas of the form used in **The Faerie 
Queene." Thyrsis speaks in blank verse and is an- 
swered by the shade of Musaeus (Pope) in heroic 
couplets. Verbal travesties of *' Lycidas " abound — 
*Maureate hearse," ''forego each vain excuse," "with- 
out the loan of some poetic woe," etc. ; and the closing 
passage is reworded thus: 

*"I1 Pacifico: Works of William Mason," London, 1811, Vol. 
I. p. 166. 



The zMiltonic Group, 155 

" Thus the fond swaiiihis Doric oat essayed, 
Manhood's prime honors rising on his cheek: 
Trembling he strove to court the tuneful Maid, 
With stripling arts and dalliance all too weak, 
Unseen, unheard beneath an hawthorn shade. 
But now dun clouds the welkin 'gan to streak; 
And now down dropt the larks and ceased their strain: 
They ceased, and with them ceased the shepherd swain." 

In 1746 appeared a small volume of odes, fourteen 
n number, by Joseph Warton, and another by William 
Dollins.* The event is thus noticed by Gray in a 
etter to Thomas Wharton: **Have you seen the 
vorks of two young authors, a Mr. Warton and a Mr. 
Iloilins, both writers of odes? It is odd enough, but 
iach is the half of a considerable man, and one the 
counterpart of the other. The first has but little 
nvention, very poetical choice of expression and a 
yood ear. The second, a fine fancy, modelled upon 
[he antique, a bad ear, great variety of words and 
images with no choice at all. They both deserve to 
last some years, but will not." Gray's critical acute- 
ness is not altogether at fault in this judgment, but 
half of his prophecy has failed, and his mention of 
Collins is singularly inappreciative. The names of 
Collins and Gray are now closely associated in literary 
history, but in life the two men were in no way con- 
nected. Collins and the Wartons, on the other hand, 
were personal friends. Joseph Warton and Collins 
had been schoolfellows at Winchester, and it was at 
first intended that their odes, which were issued in the 
same month (December), should be published in a 
volume together. Warton's collection was immedi- 

* " Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects." 



156 f^ History of English %omanticism. 

ately successful; but Collins' was a failure, and the 
author, in his disappointment, burned the unsold 
copies. 

The odes of Warton which most nearly resemble 
Milton are *'To Fancy," ''To Solitude," and ''To 
the Nightingale," all in the eight-syllabled couplet. 
A single passage will serve as a specimen of their 
quality: 

" Me, Goddess, by the right hand lead 
Sometimes through the yellow mead, 
Where Joy and white-robed Peace resort 
And Venus keeps her festive court: 
Where Mirth and Youth each evening meet, 
And lightly trip with nimble feet, 
Nodding their lily-crowned heads; 
Where Laughter rose-lip'd Hebe leads," etc.* 

Collins* "Ode to Simplicity" is in the stanza of the 
"Nativity Ode," and his beautiful " Ode to Evening," 
in the unrhymed sapphics which Milton had employed 
in his translation of Horace's "Ode to Pyrrha." 
There are Miltonic reminiscences like "folding-star," 
"religious gleams," "play with the tangles of her 
hair, " and in the closing couplet of the ' ' Ode to Fear, " 

" His cypress wreath my meed decree, 
And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee." 

But, in general, Collins is much less slavish than War- 
ton in his imitation. 

Joseph Warton's younger brother, Thomas, wrote 
in 1745, and published in 1747, "The Pleasures of 
Melancholy," a blank-verse poem of three hundred and 
fifteen lines, made up, in nearly equal parts, of Milton 

* " To Fancy." 



The DAiltonic Group. 157 

and Akenside, with frequent touches of Thomson, 
Spenser, and Pope's ** Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard." 
Warton was a lad of seventeen when his poem was 
written: it was published anonymously and was by 
some attributed to Akenside, whose '* Pleasures of 
Imagination" (1744) had, of course, suggested the 
title. A single extract will suffice to show how well 
the young poet knew his Milt;pn: 

" O lead me, queen sublime, to solemn glooms 
Congenial with my soul; to cheerless shades, 
To ruined seats, to twilight cells and bowers, 
Where thoughtful Melancholy loves to muse, 
Her favorite midnight haunts. . . 
Beneath yon ruined abbey's moss-grown piles 
Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, 
When through some western window the pale moon 
Pours her lotig-levelled rule of sir earning light : 
While sullen sacred silence reigns around, 
Save the lone screech-owl's note, who builds his bower 
Amid the moldering caverns dark and damp; * 
Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves 
Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green 
Invests some wasted tower. . . 
Then when the sullen shades of evening close 
Where through the room a blindly-glimmering gloom 
The dying embers scatter, far remote 
From ]\Iirth's mad shouts, that through the illumined roof 
Resound with festive echo, let me sit 
Blessed with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . . 



* Cf. Gray's " Elegy," first printed in 1751 : 

** Save that, from yonder ivy-mantled tower, 

The moping owl does to the moon complain 
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, 
Molest her ancient, solitary reign." 



158 e^ History of English %omanticism. 

This sober hour of silence will unmask 

False Folly's smile, that like the dazzling spells 

Of wily Comus cheat the unweeting eye 

With dlfar ilhision^ and persuade to drink 

That charmed cup which Reason's mintage fair 

Unmoulds, and stamps the monster on the man." 

I italicize the most direct borrowings, but both the 
Wartons had so saturated themselves with Milton's 
language, verse, and imagery that they ooze out of 
them at every pore. Thomas Warton's poems, issued 
separately from time to time, were first published col- 
lectively in 1777. They are all imitative, and most of 
them imitative of Milton. His two best odes, "On 
the First of April " and "On the Approach of Sum- 
mer," are in the familiar octosyllabics. 

" Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand, 
With thee lead a buxom band ; 
Bring fantastic-footed joy, 
With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy," etc.* 

In Gray and Collins, though one can hardly read a 
page without being reminded of Milton, it is com- 
monly in subtler ways than this. Gray, for example, 
has been careful to point out in his notes his verbal 
obligations to Milton, as well as to Shakspere, Cowley, 
Dryden, Pindar, Vergil, Dante, and others; but what 
he could not well point out, because it was probably 
unconscious, was the impulse which Milton frequently 
gave to the whole exercise of his imagination. It is 
not often that Gray treads so closely in Milton's foot- 

* " On the Approach of Summer." The '' wattled cotes," " sweet- 
briar hedges," " woodnotes wild," " tanned haycock in the mead," 
and " valleys where mild whispers use," are transferred bodily into 
this ode from " L Allegro." 



The DAiltonic Group. 159 

steps as he does in the latest of his poems, the ode 
written for music, and performeed at Cambridge in 
1769 on the installation of the Duke of Grafton as 
Chancellor; in which Milton is made to sing a stanza 
in the meter of the ** Nativity Ode " : 

" Ye brown o'er-arching groves 

That Contemplation loves, 
"Where vi'illowy Camus lingers with delight; 

Oft at the blush of dawn 

I trod your level lawn, 
Oft wooed, the gleam of Cynthia, silver bright, 
In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly, 
With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy." 

Not only the poets who have been named, but many 
obscure versifiers are witnesses to this Miltonic revi- 
val. It is usually, indeed, the minor poetry of an age 
which keeps most distinctly the *' cicatrice and capable 
impressure " of a passing literary fashion. If we look 
through Dodsley's collection,* we find a mela7ige of 
satires in the manner of Pope, humorous fables in the 
manner of Prior, didactic blank-verse pieces after the 
fashion of Thomson and Akenside, elegiac quatrains 
on the model of Shenstone and Gray, Pindaric odes ^z</ 
nauseam, with imitations of Spenser and Milton, f 

* Three volumes appeared in 1748; a second edition, with Vol. 
IV. added in 1749, Vols. V. and VI. in 1758. There were new editions 
in 1765, 1770, 1775, and 1782. Pearch's continuations were pub- 
lished in 1768 (Vols. VII. and VIII.), and 1770 (Vols. IX. and X.); 
Mendez's independent collection in 1767; and Bell's *' Fugitive Poe- 
try," in 18 volumes, in 1790-97. 

f The reader who may wish to pursue this inquiry farther will 
find the following list of Miltonic imitations useful: Dodsley's 
" Miscellany," I, 164, Pre-existence : " A Poem in Imitation of 
Milton," by Dr. Evans. This is in blank verse, and Gray, in a let- 
ter to Walpole, calls it "nonsense." II. 109, "The Institution of 



i6o zA History of English l^omanticism. 

To the increasing popularity of Milton's minor poe- 
try is due the revival of the sonnet. Gray's solitary 
sonnet, on the death of his friend Richard West, was 
composed in 1742 but not printed till 1775, after the 
author's death. This was the sonnet selected by 
Wordsworth, to illustrate his strictures on the spurious 
poetic diction of the eighteenth century, in the appen- 
dix to the preface to the second edition of ** Lyrical 
Ballads." The style is noble, though somewhat arti- 
ficial: the order of the rhymes conforms neither to the 
Shaksperian nor the Miltonic model. Mason wrote 
fourteen sonnets at various times between 1748 and 
1797; the earlier date is attached, in his collected 
works, to *' Sonnet I. Sent to a Young Lady with 
Dodsley's Miscellanies." They are of the strict Ital- 
ian or Miltonic form, and abound in Miltonic allusions 

the Order of the Garter," by Gilbert West, This is a dramatic 
poem, with a chorus of British bards, which is several times quoted 
and commended in Joseph Warton's " Essay on Pope." West's 
" Monody on the Death of Queen Caroline," is a " Lycidas" imita- 
tion. III. 214, " Lament for Melpomene and Calliope," by J. G. 
Cooper; also a " Lycidas " poem, IV. 50, " Penshurst," by Mr. F. 
Coventry: a very close imitation of " L'Allegro " and "II Pen- 
seroso," IV, 181, " Ode to Fancy," by the Rev. Mr. Merrick: octo- 
syllables. IV, 229, " Solitude, an Ode," by Dr, Grainger: octosyl- 
lables, V. 283, "Prologue to Comus," performed at Bath, 1756. 

VI. 148, " Vacation," by — , Esq.: " L'Allegro," very close — 

" These delights, Vacation, give. 

And I with thee will choose to live," 

IX. (Pearch) 199, " Ode to Health," by J, H. B., Esq.: " L'Allegro." 

X. 5, " The Valetudinarian," by Dr, Marriott: "L'Allegro," very 
close. X. 97, " To the Moon," by Robert Lloyd: " II Penseroso,' 
close. Parody is one of the surest testimonies to the prevalence of ai 
literary fashion, and in Vol. X. p. 269 of Pearch, occurs a humorous» 
" Ode to Horror," burlesquing " The Enthusiast " and " The Pleas- 



7he €Miltontc Group. i6i 

and wordings. All but four of Thomas Edwards' fifty 
sonnets, 1750-65, are on Milton's model. Thirteen 
of them were printed in Dodsley's second volume. 
They have little value, nor have those of Benjamin 
Stillingfleet, some of which appear to have been writ- 
ten before 1750. Of much greater interest are the 
sonnets of Thomas Warton, nine in number and all 
Miltonic in form. Warton's collected poems were not 
published till 1777, and his sonnets are undated, but 
some of them seem to have been written as early as 
1750. They are graceful in expression and reflect 
their author's antiquarian tastes. They were praised 
by Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Lamb; and one of them, 
*'To the River Lodon," has been thought to have 
suggested Coleridge's "To the River Otter — " 

" Dear native stream, wild streamlet of the west — " 

ures of Melancholy, '^ " in the allegoric, descriptive, alliterative, epi- 
thetical, hyperbolical, and diabolical style of our modern ode-wrights 
and monody-mongers," from which I extract a passage : 
" O haste thee, mild Miltonic maid, 

From yonder yew's sequestered shade. . . 

O thou whom wandering Warton saw, 

Amazed with more than youthful awe, 

As by the pale moon's glimmering gleam 

He mused his melancholy theme. 

O Curfew-loving goddess, haste ! 

O waft me to some Scythian waste, 

Where, in Gothic solitude. 

Mid prospects most sublimely rude. 

Beneath a rough rock's gloomy chasm, 

Thy sister sits, Enthusiasm." 
" Bell's Fugitive Poetry," Vol. XI. (1791), has a section devoted to 
*' poems in the manner of Milton," by Evans, Mason, T. Warton, 
and a Mr. P. (L' Amoroso). 



1 62 <s/i History of English l^omanticism. 

as well as, perhaps, more remotely Wordsworth's series, 
*'0n the River Duddon." 

The poem of Milton which made the deepest im- 
pression upon the new school of poets was " II 
Penseroso." This little masterpiece, which sums up 
in imagery of '* Attic choice" the pleasures that 
Burton and Fletcher and many others had found in 
the indulgence of the atrabilious humor, fell in with a 
current of tendency. Pope had died in 1744, Swift 
in 1745, the last important survivors of the Queen 
Anne wits; and already the reaction against gayety 
had set in, in the deliberate and exaggerated solemnity 
which took possession of all departments of verse, 
and even invaded the theater; where Melpomene 
gradually crowded Thalia off the boards, until senti- 
mental comedy — la comedie lari7ioyante — was in turn 
expelled by the ridicule of Garrick, Goldsmith, and 
Sheridan. That elegiac mood, that love of retire- 
ment and seclusion, which have been remarked in 
Shenstone, became now the dominant note in English 
poetry. The imaginative literature of the years 1740- 
60 was largely the literature of low spirits. The 
generation was persuaded, with Fletcher, that 

" Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy." 

But the muse of their inspiration was not the tragic 
Titaness of Diirer's painting: 

" The Melencolia that transcends all wit." * 

rather the " mild Miltonic maid," Pensive Meditation. 
There were various shades of somberness, from the 

* See James Thomson's " City of Dreadful Night," xxi. Also the 
frontispiece to Mr. E. C. Stedman's " Nature of i^oetry " (1892) and 
pp. 140-41 of the same. 



The iMiltonic Group, 163 

delicate gray of the Wartons to the funereal sable of 
Young's '* Night Thoughts " (1742-44) and Blair's 
" Grave " (1743). Gosse speaks of Young as a *' con- 
necting link between this group of poets and their 
predecessors of the Augustan age." His poem does, 
indeed, exhibit much of the wit, rhetorical glitter, and 
straining after point familiar in Queen Anne verse, in 
strange combination with a **rich note of romantic 
despair. "* Mr. Perry, too, describes Young's lan- 
guage as ''adorned with much of the crude ore of 
romanticism. . . At this period the properties of 
the poet were but few: the tomb, an occasional raven 
or screech-owl, and the pale moon, with skeletons 
and grinning ghosts. , . One thing that the poets 
were never tired of, was the tomb . . It was the 
dramatic — can one say the melodramatic? — view of the 
grave, as an inspirer of pleasing gloom, that was pre- 
paring readers for the romantic outbreak." f 

It was, of course, in Gray's "Elegy Written in a 
Country Churchyard " (175 1), that this elegiac feeling 
found its most perfect expression. ^ Collins, too, has 
"more hearse-like airs than carols," and two of his 
most heartfelt lyrics are the " Dirge in Cymbeline " and 
the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson. "\ And the 
Wartons were perpetually recommending such themes, 
both by precept and example. J Blair and Young, 

* " Eighteenth Century Literature," pp. 209, 212. 

f " English Literature in the Eighteenth Century," pp. 375, 379. 

if Joseph mentions as one of Spenser's characteristics, "a certain 
pleasing melancholy in his sentiments, the constant companion of an 
elegant taste, that casts a delicacy and grace over all his composi- 
tion," " Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 29. In his review of Pope's 
"Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard," he says: " the effect and influence 
of Melancholy, who is beautifully personified, on every object that 



1 64 <iA History of English Romanticism. 

however, are scarcely to be reckoned among the 
romanticists. They were heavy didactic-moral poets, 
for the most part, though they touched the string 
which, in the Gothic imagination, vibrates with a 
musical shiver to the thought of death. There is 
something that accords with the spirit of Gothic 
ecclesiastical architecture, with Gray's *' ivy-mantled 
tower" — his "long-drawn aisle and fretted vault" — 
in the paraphernalia of the tomb which they accumu- 
late so laboriously: the cypress and the yew, the owl 
and the midnight bell, the dust of the charnel-house, 
the nettles that fringe the grave-stones, the dim 
sepulchral lamp and gliding specters. 

** The wind is up. Hark ! how it howls ! Methinks 
Till now I never heard a sound so dreary. 
Doors creak and windows clap, and night's foUl bird. 
Rocked in the spire, screams loud : the gloomy aisles, 
Black-plastered and hung 'round with shreds of scutcheons 
And tattered coats-of-arms, send back the sound, 
Laden with heavier airs, from the low vaults, 
The mansions of the dead." * 

Blair's mortuary verse has a certain impressiveness, 
in its gloomy monotony, not unlike that of Quarles' 
** Divine Emblems." Like the "Emblems," too, 
"The Grave " has been kept from oblivion by the art 
of the illustrator, the well-known series of engravings- 
by Schiavonetti from designs by Wm. Blake. 

But the thoughtful, scholarly fancy of the more^ 

occurs and on every part of the convent, cannot be too much ap-^ 
plauded, or too often read, as it is founded on nature and experience. 
That temper of mind casts a gloom on all things. 

" ' But o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves,' etc." 

— /did., Vol. I. p. 314. 
* " The Grave," by Robert Blair. 



7he zMiltonic Group. 165 

purely romantic poets haunted the dusk rather than 
the ebon blackness of midnight, and listened more to 
the nightingale than to the screech-owl. They were 
quietists, and their imagery was crepuscular. They 
loved the twilight, with its beetle and bat, solitude, 
shade, the "darkening vale," the mossy hermitage, 
the ruined abbey moldering in its moonlit glade, 
grots, caverns, brooksides, ivied nooks, firelight 
rooms, the curfew bell and the sigh of the aeolian 
harp.* All this is exquisitely put in Collins' ** Ode to 
Evening." Joseph Warton also wrote an "Ode to 
Evening," as well as one "To the Nightingale." 
Both Wartons wrote odes "To Solitude." Dodsley's 
"Miscellanies" are full of odes to Evening, Solitude, 

* The asolian harp was a favorite property of romantic poets for a 
hundred years. See Mason's "Ode to an bolus's Harp " (Works, 
Vol. I. p. 51). First invented by the Jesuit, Kircher, about 1650, 
and described in his " Musurgia Universalis," Mason says that it 
vi^as forgotten for upwards of a century and " accidentally rediscov- 
ered" in England by a Mr. Oswald. It is mentioned in "The 
Castle of Indolence " (i. xl) as a novelty : 

" A certain music never known before 

Here lulled the pensive melancholy mind " — 

a passage to which Collins alludes in his verses on Thomson's 
death— 

" In yon deep bed of whispering reeds 
His airy harp shall now be laid." 

See *' The Lay of the Last Minstrel " I. 341-42 (1805.) 
" Like that wild harp whose magic tone 
Is wakened by the winds alone." 

And Arthur Cleveland Coxe's {Christian Ballads, 1840) 
" It was a wind-harp's magic strong, 
Touched by the breeze in dreamy song," 
and the poetry of the Annuals /aj-i'/w. 



1 66 e/^ History of English 'T^omanticism, 

Silence, Retirement, Contentment, Fancy, Melan- 
choly, Innocence, Simplicity, Sleep; of Pleasures of 
Contemplation (Miss Whately, Vol. IX. p. 120) Tri- 
umphs of Melancholy (James Beattie, Vol. X. p. 77), 
and similar matter. Collins introduced a personified 
figure of Melancholy in his ode, *'The Passions." 

" With eyes upraised, as one inspired, 
Pale Melancholy sat retired ; 
And from her wild, sequestered seat, 
In notes by distance made more sweet. 
Poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul ; 
And dashing soft from rocks around, 
Bubbling runnels joined the sound ; 
Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole. 
Or o'er some haunted stream, with fond delay, 
Round a holy calm diffusing, 
Love of peace and lonely musing, 
In hollow murmurs died away." 

Collins was himself afflicted with a melancholia 
which finally developed into madness. Gray, a shy, 
fastidious scholar, suffered from inherited gout and a 
lasting depression of spirits. He passed his life as a 
college recluse in the cloistered retirement of Cam- 
bridge, residing at one time in Pembroke, and at an- 
other in Peterhouse College. He held the chair of 
modern history in the university, but never gave a lec- 
ture. He declined the laureateship after Cibber's 
death. He had great learning, and a taste most deli- 
cately correct; but the sources of creative impulse 
dried up in him more and more under the desiccating 
air of academic study and the increasing hold upon 
him of his constitutional malady. "Melancholy 
marked him for her own. "" There is a significant pas- 
sage in one of his early letters to Horace Walpole 



The zMiltonic Group. 167 

(1737)* "I have, at the distance of half a mile, 
through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar call it a 
common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy 
no human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos 
of mountains and precipices. . . Both vale and hill 
are covered with most venerable beeches and other 
very reverend vegetables that, like most other ancient 
people, are always dreaming out their old stories to 
the winds. . .^ At the foot of one of these, squats 
ME, I, (il penseroso) and there grow to the trunk for 
a whole morning." * To Richard West he wrote, in 
the same year, **Low spirits are my true and faithful 
companions"; and, in 1742, **Mine is a white Melan- 
choly, or rather Leucocholy, for the most part . . . 
but there is another sort, black indeed, which I have 
now and then felt." 

When Gray sees the Eton schoolboys at their sports, 
he is sadly reminded: 

" — how all around them wait 
The ministers of human fate 
And black Misfortune's baleful train. " f 

"Wisdom in sable garb," and *' Melancholy, silent 
maid" attend the footsteps of Adversity; J and to 
Contemplation's sober eye, the race of man resembles 
the insect race: 

" Brushed by the hand of rough mischance, 
Or chilled by age, their airy dance 
They leave, in dust to rest." § 

* Cf. the " Elegy": 

" There at the foot of yonder nodding beech," etc. 
f " On a Distant Prospect of Eton College." 
\ " Hymn to Adversity." 
§ " Ode on the Spring." 



1 68 zA History of English Romanticism. 

Will it be thought too trifling an observation that the 
poets of this group were mostly bachelors and g^iw ad 
hocy solitaries? Thomson, Akenside, Shenstone, Col- 
lins, Gray, and Thomas Warton never married. Dyer, 
Mason, and Joseph Warton, were beneficed clergymen, 
and took unto themselves wives. The Wartons, to be 
sure, were men of cheerful and even convivial habits. 
The melancholy which these good fellows affected was 
manifestly a mere literary fashion. They were sad 
** only for wantonness," like the young gentlemen in 
France. "And so you have a garden of your own," 
wrote Gray to his young friend NichoUs, in 1769, 
*'and you plant and transplant, and are dirty and 
amused; are you not ashamed of yourself? Why, I 
have no such thing, you monster; nor ever shall be 
either dirty or amused as long as I live." Gray never 
was; but the Wartons were easily amused, and 
Thomas, by all accounts, not unfrequently dirty, or at 
least slovenly in his dress, and careless and unpolished 
in his manners, and rather inclined to broad humor 
and low society. 

Romantically speaking, the work of these Miltonic 
lyrists marks an advance upon that of the descriptive 
and elegiac poets, Thomson, Akenside, Dyer, and 
Shenstone. Collins is among the choicest of English 
lyrical poets. There is a flute-like music in his best 
odes — such as the one '*To Evening," and the one 
written in 1746 — "How sleep the brave," which are 
sweeter, more natural, and more spontaneous than 
Gray's. " The Muse gave birth to Collins,'* says 
Swinburne; " she did but give suck to Gray." Col- 
lins " was a solitary song-bird among many more or 
less excellent pipers and pianists. He could put more 



The iMiltonic Group. 169 

spirit of color into a single stroke, more breath of 
music into a single note, than could all the rest of the 
generation into all the labors of their lives."* Col- 
lins, like Gray, was a Greek scholar, and had projected 
a history of the revival of letters. There is a classical 
quality in his verse — not classical in the eighteenth- 
century sense — but truly Hellenic; a union, as in 
Keats, of Attic form with romantic sensibility; though 
in Collins, more than in Keats, the warmth seems to 
come from without; the statue of a nymph flushed 
with sunrise. ''Collins," says Gosse, " has the touch 
of a sculptor; his verse is clearly cut and direct: it is 
marble pure, but also marble cold."f Lowell, how- 
ever, thinks that Collins ''was the first to bring back 
into poetry something of the antique flavor, and found 
again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant 
without being pedantically cold." J 

These estimates are given for what they are worth. 
The coldness which is felt — or fancied — in some of 
Collins' poetry comes partly from the abstractness of 
his subjects and the artificial style which he inherited, 
in common with all his generation. Many of his odes 
are addressed to Fear, Pity, Mercy, Liberty, and simi- 
lar abstractions. The pseudo-Pindaric ode, is, in 
itself, an exotic; and, as an art form, is responsible for 
some of the most tumid compositions in the history of 
English verse. Collins' most current ode, though by ' 
no means his best one, "The Passions," abounds in 
those personifications which, as has been said, consti- 
tuted, in eighteenth-century poetry, a sort of feeble 

* " Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. pp. 278-82. 
f ** Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 233. 
t Essay on " Pope." 



lyo e/^ History of English Romanticism. 

mythology: "wan Despair," ^'dejected Pity," 
''brown Exercise," and ''Music sphere-descended 
maid." It was probably the allegorical figures in Mil- 
ton's " L'Allegro " and "II Penseroso," "Sport that 
wrinkled care derides," "spare Fast that oft with 
gods doth diet," etc., that gave a new lease of life to 
this obsolescent machinery which the romanticists 
ought to have abandoned to the Augustan schools. 

The most interesting of Collins' poems, from the 
point of view of these inquiries, is his "Ode on the 
Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland." 
This was written in 1749, but as it remained in manu- 
script till 1788, it was of course without influence on 
the minds of its author's contemporaries. It had been 
left unfinished, and some of the printed editions con- 
tained interpolated stanzas which have since been 
weeded away. Inscribed to Mr. John Home, the au- 
thor of "Douglas," its purpose was to recommend to 
him the Scottish fairy lore as a fit subject for poetry. 
Collins justifies the selection of such " false themes " 
by the example of Spenser, of Shakspere, (in "Mac- 
beth "), and of Tasso 

' * — whose undoubting mind 
Believed the magic wonders which he sung." 

He mentions, as instances of popular beliefs that have 
poetic capabilities, the kelpie, the will-o'-the-wisp, 
and second sight. He alludes to the ballad of " Willie 
Drowned in Yarrow," and doubtless with a line of 
" The Seasons " running in his head,* conjures Home 
to " forget not Kilda's race," who live on the eggs of 
the solan goose, whose only prospect is the wintry 

*See anU, p. 114. 



The tMiltonic Group. 171 

main, and among whose cliffs the bee is never heard to 
murmur. Perhaps the most imaginative stanza is the 
ninth, referring to the Hebrides, the chapel of St. 
Flannan and the graves of the Scottish, Irish, and 
Norwegian kings in Icolmkill : 

** Unbounded is thy range ; with varied skill 

Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring 
From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing, 

Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, 
To that hoar pile which still its ruins shows ; 

In whose small vaults a pygmy folk is found, 

Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, 

And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground ; 

Or thither, where, beneath the showery west. 
The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid ; 

Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest. 
No slaves revere them and no wars invade. 

Yet frequent now at midnight's solemn hour, 
The rifted mounds their yawning cells unfold, 

And forth the monarchs stalk with sovereign power. 
In pageant robes, and wreathed with sheeny gold, 
And on their twilight tombs aerial council hold." 

Collins' work was all done by 1749; for though he 
survived ten years longer, his mind was in eclipse. 
He was a lover and student of Shakspere, and when 
the Wartons paid him a last visit at the time of his 
residence with his sister in the cloisters of Chichester 
Cathedral, he told Thomas that he had discovered the 
source of the '* Tempest," in a novel called *' Aurelio 
and Isabella," printed in 1588 in Spanish, Italian, 
French, and English. No such novel has been found, 
and it was seemingly a figment of Collins' disordered 
fancy. During a lucid interval in the course of this 
visit, he read to the Wartons, from the manuscript, 



172 zA History of English Romanticism. 

his '*Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish High- 
lands " ; and also a poem which is lost, entitled, ^* The 
Bell of Arragon," founded on the legend of the great 
bell of Saragossa that tolled of its own accord when- 
ever a king of Spain was dying. 

Johnson was also a friend of Collins, and spoke of 
him kindly in his ** Lives of the Poets," though he 
valued his writings little. " He had employed his 
mind chiefly upon works of fiction and subjects of 
fancy; and by indulging some peculiar habits of 
thought, was eminently delighted with those flights 
of imagination which pass the bounds of nature, and 
to which the mind is reconciled only by a passive 
acquiescence in popular traditions. He loved fairies, 
genii, giants, and monsters; he delighted to rove 
through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the 
magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the 
water-falls of Elysian gardens. This was, however, 
the character rather of his inclination than his genius; 
the grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extrava- 
gance were always desired by him, but were not always 
attained."* 

Thomas Gray is a much more important figure than 
Collins in the intellectual history of his generation; 
but this superior importance does not rest entirely upon 
his verse, which is hardly more abundant than Collins', 
though of a higher finish. His letters, journals, and 
other prose remains, posthumously published, first 
showed how long an arc his mind had subtended on 
the circle of art and thought. He was sensitive to all 
fine influences that were in the literary air. One of the 
greatest scholars among English poets, his taste was 
*" Life of Collins." 



The (Miltonic Group. 173 

equal to his acquisitions. He was a sound critic of 
poetry, music, architecture, and painting. His mind 
and character both had distinction; and if there was 
something a trifle finical and old-maidish about his 
personality — which led the young Cantabs on one 
occasion to take a rather brutal advantage of his 
nervous dread of fire — there was also that nice reserve 
which gave to Milton, when he was at Cambridge, the 
nickname of the *'the lady of Christ's." 

A few of Gray's simpler odes, the **Ode on the 
Spring," the *'Hymn to Adversity" and the Eton 
College ode, were written in 1742 and printed in 
Dodsley's collection in 1748. The *' Elegy" was 
published in 1751; the two ** sister odes," *'The Prog- 
ress of Poesy" and **The Bard," were struck off from 
Horace Walpole's private press at Strawberry Hill 
in 1757. Gray's popular fame rests, and will always 
rest, upon his immortal "Elegy." He himself 
denied somewhat impatiently that it was his best 
poem, and thought that its popularity was owing to 
its subject. There are not wanting critics of author- 
ity, such as Lowell and Matthew Arnold, who have 
pronounced Gray's odes higher poetry than his 
** Elegy." ***The Progress of Poesy,'" says Lowell, 
** overflies all other English lyrics like an eagle. . . 
It was the prevailing blast of Gray's trumpet that, 
more than anything else, called men back to the 
legitimate standard." * With all deference to such 
distinguished judges, I venture to think that the 
popular instinct on this point is right, and even that 
Dr. Johnson is not so wrong as usual. Johnson dis- 
liked Gray and spoke of him with surly injustice. 
"Essay on "Pope." 



174 ^ History of English 'Romanticism. 

Gray, in turn, could not abide Johnson, whom he 
called Ursa major. Johnson said that Gray's odes 
were forced plants, raised in a hot-house, and poor 
plants at that. ''Sir, I do not think Gray a first-rate 
poet. He has not a bold imagination, nor much com- 
mand of words. The obscurity in which he has 
involved himself will not persuade us that he is 
sublime. His ' Elegy in a Churchyard ' has a happy 
selection of images, but I don't like what are called 
his great things." ''He attacked Gray, calling him 
a 'dull fellow.' Boswell: 'I understand he was re- 
served, and might appear dull in company; but surely 
he was not dull in poetry.' Johnson: 'Sir, he was 
dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. 
He was dull in a new way and that made many people 
think him great. He was a mechanical poet.' He 
then repeated some ludicrous lines, which have escaped 
my memory, and said, ' Is not that great, like his 
odes? ' . . . ' No, sir, there are but two good stanzas 
in Gray's poetry, which are in his "Elegy in a Country 
Churchyard." He then repeated the stanza — 

" * For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,' " etc. 

"In all Gray's odes," wrote Johnson, " there is a 
kind of cumbrous splendor which we wish away. . . 
These odes are marked by glittering accumulations 
of ungraceful ornaments; they strike rather than 
please; the images are magnified by affectation; the 
language is labored into harshness. The mind of the 
writer seems to work with unnatural violence. . . 
His art and his struggle are too visible and there is 
too little appearance of ease and nature. . . In the 
character of his 'Elegy,' I rejoice to concur with the 



The tMiltonic Group. 175 

common reader; for by the common sense of readers 
uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the 
refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, 
must be finally decided all claims to poetical honors. 
The * Churchyard ' abounds with images which find a 
mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which 
every bosom returns an echo." 

There are noble lines in Gray's more elaborate odes, 
bat they do make as a whole that mechanical, artificial 
impression of which Johnson complains. They have 
the same rhetorical ring, the worked-up fervor in 
glace of genuine passion, which was noted in Collins' 
ode *'0n the Passions." Collins and Gray were per- 
petually writing about the passions; but they treated 
them as abstractions and were quite incapable of 
exhibiting them in action. Neither of them could 
have written a ballad, a play, or a romance. Their 
odes were bookish, literary, impersonal, retrospective. 
They had too much of the ichor of fancy and too little 
red blood in them. 

But the *' Elegy" is the masterpiece of this whole 
*'I1 Penseroso " school, and has summed up for all 
English readers, for all time, the poetry of the tomb. 
Like the ** Essay on Man," and *' Night Thoughts" 
and "The Grave," it is a poem of the moral-didactic 
order, but very different in result from these. Its 
moral is suffused with emotion and expressed con- 
cretely. Instead of general reflections upon the 
shortness of life, the vanity of ambition, the leveling 
power of death, and similar commonplaces, we have 
the picture of the solitary poet, lingering among the 
graves at twilight (Jiora datur quteti)^ till the place and 
the hour conspire to work their effect upon the mind 



176 ^/l History of English ^manticism. 

and prepare it for the strain of meditation that follows. 
The universal appeal of its subject and the perfection 
of its style have made the ''Elegy" known by heart 
to more readers than any other poem in the language. 
Parody is one proof of celebrity, if not of popularity, 
and the ''sister odes" were presently parodied by 
Lloyd and Coleman in an "Ode to Obscurity" and an 
"Ode to Oblivion." But the "Elegy " was more than 
celebrated and more than popular; it was the most 
admired and influential poem of the generation. The 
imitations and translations of it are innumerable, 
and it met with a response as immediate as it was 
general.* One effect of this was to consecrate the 
ten-syllabled quatrain to elegiac uses. Mason altered 
the sub-title of his " Isis " (written in 1748) from 
"An Elegy" to "A Monologue," because it was "not 
written in alternate rimes, which since Mr. Gray's 
exquisite 'Elegy in the Country Church-yard' has 
generally obtained, and seems to be more suited to 
that species of poem."f Mason's " Elegy written in 
a Church-yard in South Wales" (1787) is, of course, 
in Gray's stanza and, equally of course, introduces 
a tribute to the master: 

" Yes, had he paced this church-way path along, 
Or leaned like me against this ivied wall, 
How sadly sweet had flowed his Dorian song, 
Then sweetest when it flowed at Nature's call." % 

* Mr. Perry enumerates, among English imitators. Falconer, 
T. Warton, James Graeme, Wm. Whitehead, John Scott, Henry 
Headly, John Henry Moore, and Robert Lovell, " Eighteenth 
Century Literature," p. 391. Among foreign imitations Lamartine's 
" Le Lac " is perhaps the most famous. 

f " Mason's Works," VoUI. p. 179. 

Xlbid., Vol. I. p. 114. 



The DAiltonic Group. 177 

It became almost de 7-igueur for a young poet to try 
his hand at a churchyard piece. Thus Richard Cum- 
berland, the dramatist, in his " Memoirs," records the 
fact that when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge 
in 1752 he made his ''first small offering to the press, 
following the steps of Gray with another church-yard 
elegy, written on St. Mark's Eve, when, according to 
rural tradition, the ghosts of those who are to die 
within the year ensuing are seen to walk at midnight 
across the churchyard."* Goldsmith testifies to the 
prevalence of the fashion when, in his **Life of Par- 
nell," he says of that poet's '* Night Piece on Death " f 
that, ''with very little amendment," it "might be 
made to surpass all those night-pieces and church-yard 
scenes that have since appeared." But in this opinion 
Johnson, who says that Parnell's poem "is indirectly 
preferred by Goldsmith to Gray's 'Churchyard,'" does 
not agree; nor did the public. | 

Gray's correspondence affords a record of the prog- 
ress of romantic taste for an entire generation. He 
set out with classical prepossessions — forming his 
verse, as he declared, after Dryden — and ended with 
translations from Welsh and Norse hero-legends, and 

* Cf. Keats' unfinished poem," The Eve of St. Mark." 
f Parnell's collected poems were published in 1722. 
X Not the least interesting among the progeny of Gray's " Elegy " 
was "The Indian Burying Ground" of the American poet, Philip 
Freneau (1752-1832). Gray's touch is seen elsewhere in Freneau, 
e. g., in " The Deserted Farm-house." 

" Once in the bounds of this sequestered room 

Perhaps some swain nocturnal courtship made : 
Perhaps some Sherlock mused amid the gloom, 
Since Love and Death forever seek the shade.'* 



178 <iA History of English Romanticism. 

with an admiration for Ossian and Scotch ballads. In 
1739 he went to France and Italy with Horace Wal- 
pole. He was abroad three years, though in 1741 he 
quarreled with Walpole at Florence, separated from 
him and made his way home alone in a leisurely man- 
ner. Gray is one of the first of modern travelers to 
speak appreciatively of Gothic architecture, and of the 
scenery of the Alps, and to note those strange and 
characteristic aspects of foreign life which we now call 
picturesque, and to which every itinerary and guide- 
book draws attention. Addison, who was on his 
travels forty years before, was quite blind to such 
matters. Not that he was without the feeling of the 
sublime: he finds, e. g.^ an *' agreeable horror" in the 
prospect of a storm at sea.* But he wrote of his pas- 
sage through Switzerland as a disagreeable and even 
frightful experience: *'a very troublesome journey 
over the Alps. My head is still giddy with mountains 
and precipices; and you can't imagine how much I am 
pleased with the sight of a plain." 

** Let any one reflect," says the Spectator, \ *' on the 
disposition of mind he finds in himself at his first 
entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how his 
imagination is filled with something great and amazing; 
and, at the same time, consider how little, in propor- 
tion, he is affected with the inside of a Gothic cathe- 
dral, though it be five times larger than the other; 
which can arise from nothing else but the greatness of 
the manner in the one, and the meanness in the 
other."]: 

* Spectator, No. 489, 

f No. 415. 

\ John Hill Burton, in his '' Reign of Queen Anne " gives a pas- 



7 he [Miltonic Group. 179 

Gray describes the cathedral at Rheims as **a vast 
Gothic building of a surprising beauty and lightness, 
all covered over with a profusion of little statues and 
other ornaments "; and the cathedral at Siena, which 
Addison had characterized as ''barbarous," and as an 
instance of " false beauties and affected ornaments," 
Gray commends as "labored with a Gothic niceness 
and delicacy in the old-fashioned way." It must be 
acknowledged that these are rather cold praises, but 
Gray was continually advaticing in his knowledge of 
Gothic and his liking for it. Later in life he became 
something of an antiquarian and virtuoso. He corre- 
sponded with Rev. Thomas Wharton, about stained glass 
and paper hangings, which Wharton, who was refitting 
his house in the Gothic taste, had commissioned Gray 
to buy for him of London dealers. He describes, for 
Wharton's benefit, Walpole's new bedroom at Straw- 
berry Hill as " in the best taste of anything he has yet 
done, and in your own Gothic way"; and he advises 
his correspondent as to the selection of patterns for 
staircases and arcade work. There was evidently a 
great stir of curiosity concerning Strawberry Hill in 
Gray's coterie, and a determination to be Gothic at all 

sage from a letter of one Captain Burt, superintendent of certain 
road-making operations in the Scotch Highlands, by way of showing 
how very modern a person Carlyle's picturesque tourist is. The cap- 
tain describes the romantic scenery of the glens as " horrid pros- 
pects." It was considerably later in the century that Dr. Johnson 
said, in answer to Boswell's timid suggestion that Scotland had a great 
many noble wild prospects, " I believe, sir, you have a great many. 
Norway, too, has noble wild prospects, and Lapland is remarkable for 
prodigious noble wild prospects. But, sir, let me tell you, the 
noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high-road that 
leads him to England." 



I So ft^ History of English Romanticism. 

hazards; and the poet felt obliged to warn his friends 
that zeal should not outrun discretion. He writes to 
Wharton in 1754 : ** I rejoice to find you at last settled 
to your heart's content, and delight to hear you talk 
of giving your house some Gothic ornaments already. 
If you project anything, I hope it will be entirely 
within doors; and don't let me (when I come gaping 
into Coleman Street) be directed to the gentleman at 
the ten pinnacles, or with the church porch at his 
door." Again, to the same (1761): ** It is mere 
pedantry in Gothicism to stick to nothing but altars and 
tombs, and there is no end to it, if we are to sit upon 
nothing but coronation chairs, nor drink out of noth- 
ing but chalices or flagons." Writing to Mason in 
1758 about certain incongruities in one of the latter's 
odes, he gives the following Doresque illustration of 
his point. **If you should lead me into a superb 
Gothic building, with a thousand clustered pillars, each 
of them half a mile high, the walls all covered with 
fret-work, and the windows full of red and blue saints 
that had neither head nor tail, and I should find the 
Venus de Medici in person perked up in a long niche 
over the high altar, as naked as she was born, do you 
think it would raise or damp my devotions?"* He 
made it a favorite occupation to visit and take draw- 
ings from celebrated ruins and the great English 
cathedrals, particularly those in the Cambridge fens, 
Ely and Peterboro'. These studies he utilized in a 

*See also Gray's letter to Rev. James Brown (1763) inclosing a 
drawing, in reference to a small ruined chapel at York Minster ; and 
a letter (about 1765) to Jas. Bentham, Prebendary of Ely, whose 
' ' Essay on Gothic Architecture " had been wrongly attributed ta 
Gray. 



The zMiltonic Group. i8i 

short essay on Norman architecture, first published by 
Mitford in 1814, and incorrectly entitled " Architectura 
Gothica." 

Reverting to his early letters from abroad one is 
struck by the anticipation of the modern attitude, in 
his description of a visit to the Grande Chartreuse, 
which he calls ''one of the most solemn, the most 
romantic, and the most astonishing scenes." * '* I do 
not remember to have gone ten paces without an ex- 
clamation that there was no restraining. Not a preci- 
pice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with 
religion and poetry. . . One need not have a very 
fantastic imagination to see spirits there at noonday." f 
Walpole's letter of about the same date, also to West, J 
is equally ecstatic. It is written *' from a hamlet among 
the mountains of Savoy. . . Here we are, the lonely 
lords of glorious desolate prospects. . . But the 
road. West, the road! Winding round a prodigious 
mountain, surrounded with others, all shagged with 
hanging woods, obscured with pines, or lost in clouds! 
Below a torrent breaking through cliffs, and tumbling 
through fragments of rocks! . . . Now and then 
an old foot bridge, with a broken rail, a leaning 
cross, a cottage or the ruin of an hermitage! This 
sounds too bombast and too romantic to one that has 
not seen it, too cold for one that has." Or contrast 
with Addison's Italian letters passages like these, 
which foretoken Rogers and Byron. We get nothing 
so sympathetic till at least a half century later. **It 

*To Mrs. Dorothy Gray, 1739. 
f To Richard West, 1739. 

:}:Gray, Walpole, and West had been schoolfellows and intimates at 
Eton. 



i82 iA History of English 'Romanticism. 

is the most beautiful of Italian nights. . . There is a 
moon! There are stars for you! Do not you hear 
the fountain? Do not you smell the orange flowers? 
That building yonder is the convent of St. Isidore; 
and that eminence with the cypress-tress and pines 
upon it, the top of Mt. Quirinal."* *' The Neapoli- 
tans work till evening: then take their lute or guitar 
and walk about the city, or upon the sea shore with it, 
to enjoy the fresco. One sees their little brown chil- 
dren jumping about stark naked and the bigger ones 
dancing with castanets, while others play on the cym- 
bal to them." f " Kennst du das Land," then already? 
The 

'* small voices and an old guitar, 
Winning their way to an unguarded heart " ? 

And then, for a prophecy of Scott, read the description 
of Netley Abbey,;]; in a letter to Nicholls in 1764. 
**My ferryman," writes Gray in a letter to Brown 
about the same ruin, ''assured me that he would not 
go near it in the night time for all the world, though 
he knew much money had been found there. The sun 
was all too glaring and too full of gauds for such a 
scene, which ought to be visited only in the dusk of 
the evening." 

" If thou woulds't view fair Melrose aright 
Go visit it by the pale moonlight, 
For the gay beams of lightsome day 
Gild, but to flout, the ruins. Gray." 

* To West, 1740. 

f To Mrs. Dorothy Gray, 1740. 

X " Pearch's Collection " (VII. 138) gives an elegiac quatrain poem 
on " The Ruins of Netley Abbey," by a poet with the suggestive name 
of George Keate; and "The Alps," in heavy Thomsonian blank 
verse (VII. 107) by the same hand. 



The zMiltonic Group. 183 

In 1765 Gray visited the Scotch Highlands and sent 
enthusiastic histories of his trip to Wharton and 
Mason. ** Since I saw the Alps, I have seen nothing 
sublime till now." "The Lowlands are worth seeing 
once, but the mountains are ecstatic, and ought to be 
visited in pilgrimage once a year. None but those 
monstrous creatures of God know how to. join so 
much beauty with so much horror. A fig for your 
poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen that have 
not been among them." 

Again in 1770, the year before his death, he spent 
six weeks on a ramble through the western counties, 
descending the Wye in a boat for forty miles, and 
visiting among other spots which the muse had then, 
or has since, made illustrious, Hagley and the 
Leasowes, the Malvern Hills and Tintern Abbey. But 
the most significant of Gray's "Lilliputian travels," 
was his tour of the Lake Country in 1769. Here he 
was on ground that has since become classic; and the 
lover of Wordsv/orth encounters with a singular inter- 
est, in Gray's "Journal in the Lakes," written nearly 
thirty years before the " Lyrical Ballads," names like 
Grasmere, Winander, Skiddaw, Helvellyn, Derwent- 
water, Borrowdale, and Lodore. What distinguishes 
the entries in this journal from contemporary writing 
of the descriptive kind is a certain intimacy of com- 
prehension, a depth of tone which makes them seem 
like nineteenth-century work. To Gray the landscape 
was no longer a picture. It had sentiment, character, 
meaning, almost personality. Different weathers and 
different hours of the day lent it expressions subtler 
than the poets had hitherto recognized in the broad, 
general changes of storm and calm, light and dark- 



184 ^ History of English 'T^pmanticism. 

ness, and the successions of the seasons. He heard 
Nature when she whispered, as well as when she spoke 
out loud. Thomson could not have written thus, nor 
Shenstone, nor even, perhaps, Collins. But almost 
any man of cultivation and sensibility can write so 
now; or, if not so well, yet with the same accent. A 
passage or two will make my meaning clearer. 

*'To this second turning I pursued my way about 
four miles along its borders [Ulswater], beyond a vil- 
lage scattered among trees and called Water Mallock, 
in a pleasant, grave day, perfectly calm and warm, 
but without a gleam of sunshine. Then, the sky 
seeming to thicken, the valley to grow more desolate, 
and evening drawing on, I returned by the way I came 
to Penrith. . . While I was here, a little shower fell, 
red clouds came marching up the hills from the east, 
and part of a bright rainbow seemed to rise along the 
side of Castle Hill. . . The calmness and brightness 
of the evening, the roar of the waters, and the thump- 
ing of huge hammers at an iron forge not far distant, 
made it a singular walk. . . In the evening walked 
ajone down to the lake after sunset and saw the solemn 
coloring of night draw on, the last gleam of sunshine 
fading away on the hilltops, the deep serene of the 
waters, and the long shadows of the mountains thrown 
across them till they nearly touched the hithermost 
shore. At distance heard the murmur of many water- 
falls not audible in the day-time,* Wished for the 
moon, but she was dark to me and silent, hid in her 
vacant inter-lunar cave." f 

* " A soft and lulling sound is heard 
Of streams inaudible by day." 
— T/if White Doe of Rylstone, Wordsworth. 
f " Samson Agonistes." 



The [Miltonic Group, 185 

*' It is only within a few years," wrote Joseph Warton 
in 1782, ** that the picturesque scenes of our own 
country, our lakes, mountains, cascades, caverns, and 
castles, have been visited and described."* It was in 
this very year that William Gilpin published his "Ob- 
servations on the River Wye," from notes taken 
upon a tour in 1770. This was the same year when 
Gray made his tour of the W^ye, and hearing that 
Gilpin had prepared a description of the region, he 
borrowed and read his manuscript in June, 1771, a few 
weeks before his own death. These "' Observations " 
were the first of a series of volumes by Gilpin on the 
scenery of Great Britain, composed in a poetic and 
somewhat over-luxuriant style, illustrated by drawings 
in aquatinta, and all described on the title page as 
*' Relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty." They had 
great success, and several of them were translated 
into German and French, f 

* " Essay on Pope" (5th ed.), Vol. II. p. 180. 

f These were, in order of publication: " The Mountains and Lakes 
of Cumberland and Westmoreland" (2 vols.), 1789; "The High- 
lands of Scotland," 1789; "Remarks on Forest Scenery," 1791; 
" The Western Parts of England and the Isle of Wight," 1798; 
" The Coasts of Hampshire," etc., 1804; " Cambridge, Norfolk, Suf- 
folk, Essex," etc., 1809. The last two were posthumously published. 
Gilpin, who was a prebendary of Salisbury, died in 1804. Pearch's 
"Collection" (VII. 23) has " A Descriptive Poem," on the Lake 
Country, in octosyllabic couplets, introducing Keswick, Borrowdale, 
Dovedale, Lodore, Derwentwater, and other familiar localities. 



CHAPTER VI. 
Zbc Scbool of TKIlarton. 

In the progress of our inquiries, hitherto, we have 
met with little that can be called romantic in the nar- 
rowest sense. Though the literary movement had 
already begun to take a retrospective turn, few dis- 
tinctly mediaeval elements were yet in evidence. 
Neither the literature of the monk nor the literature 
of the knight had suffered resurrection. It was not 
until about 1760 that writers began to gravitate de- 
cidedly toward the Middle Ages. The first peculiarly 
mediaeval type that contrived to secure a foothold in 
eighteenth-century literature was the hermit, a figure 
which seems to have had a natural attraction, not only 
for romanticizing poets like Shenstone and Collins, 
but for the whole generation of verse writers from 
Parnell to Goldsmith, Percy and Beattie — each of whom 
composed a *' Hermit " — and even for the authors of 
**Rasselas" and "Tom Jones," in whose fictions he 
becomes a stock character, as a fountain of wisdom 
and of moral precepts, f 

f Dr. Johnson had his laugh at this popular person: , 

" * Hermit hoar, in solemn cell 
Wearing out life's evening gray. 
Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell 
"What is bliss, and which the way ?* 

" Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed, 
Scarce suppressed the starting tear: 
When the hoary sage replied, 
' Come, my lad, and drink some beer.* '* 
186 



'The School of War ton. 187 

A literary movement which reverts to the past for 
its inspiration is necessarily also a learned movement. 
Antiquarian scholarship must lead the way. The pic- 
ture of an extinct society has to be pieced together 
from the fragments at hand, and this involves special 
research. So long as this special knowledge remains 
the exclusive possession of professional antiquaries 
like Gough, Hearne, Bentham, Perry, Grose,* it bears 
no fruit in creative literature. It produces only local 
histories, surveys of cathedrals and of sepulchral 
monuments, books about Druidic remains, Roman 
walls and coins, etc., etc. It was only when men of 
imagination and of elegant tastes were enlisted in 
such pursuits that the dry stick of antiquarianism put 
forth blossoms. The poets, of course, had to make 
studies of their own, to decipher manuscripts, learn 
Old English, visit ruins, collect ballads and ancient 
armor, familiarize themselves with terms of heraldry, 
architecture, chivalry, ecclesiology and feudal law, 
and in other such ways inform and stimulate their im- 
aginations. It was many years before the joint labors 
of scholars and poets had reconstructed an image of 
mediaeval society, sharp enough in outline and brilliant 
enough in color to impress itself upon the general 
public. Scott, indeed, was the first to popularize 
romance; mainly, no doubt, because of the greater 
power and fervor of his imagination; but also, in part, 
because an ampler store of materials had been already 
accumulated when he began work. He had fed on 

*" Grose's Antiquities of Scotland" was published in 1791, and 
Burns wrote "Tarn o' Shanter" to accompany the picture of Kirk 
Alloway in this work. See his poem, " On the late Captain Grose's 
Peregrinations through Scotland." 



1 88 iA History of English ^Romanticism, ', 

Percy's *' Reliques " in boyhood; through Coleridge, 
his verse derives from Chatterton; and the line of 
Gothic romances which starts with *'The Castle of 
Otranto " is remotely responsible for *'Ivanhoe" and 
"The Talisman." But Scott too was, like Percy and 
Walpole, a virtuoso and collector; and the vast appa- 
ratus of notes and introductory matter in his metrical 
tales, and in the Waverley novels, shows how necessary 
it was for the romantic poet to be his own antiquary. 

As was to be expected, the zeal of the first roman- 
ticists was not always a zeal according to knowledge, 
and the picture of the Middle Age which they painted 
was more of a caricature than a portrait. A large 
share of mediaeval literature was inaccessible to the 
general reader. Much of it was still in manuscript. 
Much more of it was in old and rare printed copies, 
broadsides and black-letter folios, the treasures of 
great libraries and of jealously hoarded private collec- 
tions. Much was in dialects little understood — for- 
gotten forms of speech — Old French, Middle High 
German, Old Norse, mediaeval Latin, the ancient Erse 
and Cymric tongues, Anglo-Saxon. There was an 
almost total lack of apparatus for the study of this 
literature. Helps were needed in the shape of modern 
reprints of scarce texts, bibliographies, critical editions, 
translations, literary histories and manuals, glossaries 
of archaic words, dictionaries and grammars of obso- 
lete languages. These were gradually supplied by 
working specialists in different fields of investigation. 
Every side of mediaeval life has received illustration 
in its turn. Works like Tyrwhitt's edition of Chaucer 
(1775-78); the collections of mediaeval romances 
by Ellis (1805), Ritson (1802), and Weber (1810); 



I The School of War ton, 189 

Nares' and Halliwell's ** Archaic Glossary " (1822-46), 
Carter's ''Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Paint- 
ngs " (1780-94), Scott's *' Demonology and Witch- 
:raft" (1830), Hallam's ''Middle Ages" (1818), 
Meyrick's "Ancient Armour" (1824), Lady Guest's 
"Mabinogion " (1838), the publications of numberless 
ndividual scholars and of learned societies like the 
Camden, the Spenser, the Percy, the Chaucer, the 
Early English Text, the Roxburgh Club, — to mention 
Dnly English examples, taken at random, and separated 
from each other by wide intervals of time, — are in- 
stances of the labors by which mediaeval life has been 
made familiar to all who might choose to make ac- 
quaintance with it. 

The history of romanticism, after the impulse had 
once been given, is little else than a record of the 
steps by which, one after another, new features of 
that vast and complicated scheme of things which we 
loosely call the Middle Ages were brought to light 
and made available as literary material. The picture 
was constantly having fresh details added to it, nor is 
there any reason to believe that it is finished yet. 
Some of the finest pieces of mediaeval work have only 
within the last few years been brought to the attention 
of the general reader; e. g., the charming old French 
story in prose and verse, "Aucassin et Nicolete," and 
the fourteenth-century English poem, "The Perle." 
The future holds still other phases of romanticism in 
reserve; the Middle Age seems likely to be as inex- 
haustible in novel sources of inspiration as classical 
antiquity has already proved to be. The past belongs 
to the poet no less than the present, and a great part 
of the literature of every generation will always be 



iQo c/^ History of English %omantictsm. 

retrospective. The tastes and preferences of the 
individual artist will continue to find a wide field for 
selection in the rich quarry of Christian and feudal 
Europe. 

It is not a little odd that the book which first 
aroused, in modern Europe, an interest in Norse 
mythology should have been written by a Frenchman. 
This was the "Introduction a I'Histoire de Danne- 
marc," published in 1755 by Paul Henri Mallet, a 
native of Geneva and sometime Professor of Belles 
Lettres in the Royal University at Copenhagen. The 
work included also a translation of the first part 
of the Younger Edda, with an abstract of the second 
part and of the Elder Edda, and versions of several 
Runic poems. It was translated into English, in 1770, 
by Thomas Percy, the editor of the *' Reliques," under 
the title, ''Northern Antiquities; or a Description of 
the Manners, Customs, Religion, and Laws of the An- 
cient Danes." A German translation had appeared a 
few years earlier and had inspired the Schleswig-Hol- 
steiner, HeinrichWilhelm von Gerstenberg, to compose 
his ''Gedicht eines Skalden," which introduced the 
old Icelandic mythology into German poetry in 1766. 
Percy had published independently in 1763 '' Five 
Pieces of Runic Poetry, translated from the Ice- 
landic Language." 

Gray did not wait for the English translation of 
Mallet's book. In a letter to Mason, dated in 1758, 
and inclosing some criticisms on the latter's " Caracta- 
cus " (then in MS.), he wrote: "I am pleased with 
the Gothic Elysium. Do you think I am ignorant 
about either that, or the /leli before, or the twilight.^ 

" Ragnarok," or " Gotterdammerung," the twilight of the Gods. 



The School of War ton, 191 

I have been there and have seen it all in Mallet's 
* Introduction to the History of Denmark ' (it is in 
French), and many other places." It is a far cry from 
Mallet's '* System of Runic Mythology" to William 
Morris' ''Sigurd the Volsung" (1877), but to Mallet 
belongs the credit of first exciting that interest in 
Scandinavian antiquity which has enriched the prose 
and poetry not only of England but of Europe in 
general. Gray refers to him in his notes on **The 
Descent of Odin," and his work continued to be 
popular authority on its subject for at least half a 
century. Scott cites it in his annotations on ''The 
Lay of the Last Minstrel " (1805). 

Gray's studies in Runic literature took shape in "The 
Fatal Sisters " and " The Descent of Odin," written in 
1761, published in 1768. These were paraphrases of 
two poems which Gray found in the " De Causis Con- 
temnendse Mortis " (Copenhagen, 1689) of Thomas 
Bartholin, a Danish physician of the seventeenth 
:entury. The first of them describes the Valkyrie 
weaving the fates of the Danish and Irish warriors in 
ihe battle of Clontarf, fought in the eleventh century 
between Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, and Brian, King of 
Dublin; the second narrates the descent of Odin to 
N^iflheimer, to inquire of Hela concerning the doom 
)f Balder.* Gray had designed these for the intro- 

* For a full discussion of Gray'^s sources and of his knowledge of 
Did Norse, the reader should consult the appendix by Professor 
J. L. Kittredge to Professor W. L.Phelps' " Selections from Gray" 
1894, pp. xl-1.) Professor Kittredge concludes that Gray had but 
I slight knowledge of Norse, that he followed the Latin of Bar- 
holin in his renderings ; and that he probably also made use of such 
luthorities as Torfieus' " Orcades " (1697), Ole Worm's " Literatura 



192 c// History of English 'Romanticism. 

ductory chapter of his projected history of English 
poetry. He calls them imitations, which in fact they 
are, rather than literal renderings. In spite of a tinge 
of eighteenth-century diction, and of one or two 
Shaksperian and Miltonic phrases, the translator 
succeeded fairly well in reproducing the wild air of his 
originals. His biographer, Mr. Gosse, promises that 
**the student will not fail ... in the Gothic pictur- 
esqueness of 'The Descent of Odin,' to detect notes 
and phrases of a more delicate originality than are to 
be found even in his more famous writings; and will 
dwell with peculiar pleasure on those passages in which 
Gray freed himself of the trammels of an artificial and 
conventional taste, and prophesied of the new roman- 
tic age that was coming." 

Celtic antiquity shared with Gothic in this newly 
aroused interest. Here too, as in the phrase about 
"the stormy Hebrides," **Lycidas" seems to have 
furnished the spark that kindled the imaginations ol^ 
the poets. ' 

' ' Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep 
Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas ? 
For neither were ye playing on the steep 

Runica" (Copenhagen, 1636), Dr. George Hickes' monumental 
"Thesaurus" (Oxford, 1705), and Robert Sheringham's " De An- 
glorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio" (1716). Dryden's " Miscellanji 
Poems" (1716) has a verse translation, " The Waking of Angantyr,' 
from the English prose of Hickes, of a portion of the " HervaraJ 
Saga.'* Professor Kittredge refers to Sir William Temple's essay! 
"Of Poetry" and "Of Heroic Virtue." "Nichols' Anecdotes '1 
(I. 116) mentions, as published in 171 5, " The Rudiments of GramJ 
mar for the English Saxon Tongue ; with an Apology for the stud; 
of Northern Antiquities." This was by Mrs. Elizabeth Elstob, am 
was addressed to Hickes, the compiler of the " Thesaurus." 



The School of War ton, 193 

Where your old bards, the famous Druids lie, 

Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high, 

Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream." 

Joseph Warton quotes this passage twice in his 
'' Essay on Pope " (Vol. I. pp. 7 and 356, 5th ed.), once 
to assert its superiority to a passage in Pope's 
"Pastorals": *'The mention of places remarkably 
romantic, the supposed habitation of Druids, bards 
and wizards, is far more pleasing to the imagination, 
than the obvious introduction of Cam and Isis." 
Another time, to illustrate the following suggestion: 
**I have frequently wondered that our modern writers 
have made so little use of the druidical times and the 
traditions of the old bards. . . Milton, we see, was 
sensible of the force of such imagery, as we may 
gather from this short but exquisite passage." As 
further illustrations of the poetic capabilities of similar 
themes, Warton gives a stanza from Gray's **Bard" 
and some lines from Gilbert West's "Institution of 
the Order of the Garter " which describe the ghosts 
of the Druids hovering about their ruined altars at 
Stonehenge: 

** — Mysterious rows 
Of rude enormous obelisks, that rise 
Orb within orb, stupendous monuments 
Of artless architecture, such as now 
Oft-times amaze the wandering traveller, 
By the pale moon discerned on Sarum's plain." 

He then inserts two stanzas, in the Latin of Hickes* 
"Thesaurus," of an old Runic ode preserved by Olaus 
Wormius (Ole Worm) and adds an observation upon 
the Scandinavian heroes and their contempt of death. 
Druids and bards now begin to abound. Collins' 



^ 



194 <tA History of English Romanticism. 

*'Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson," <?. ^., com- 
mences with the line 

" In yonder grave a Druid lies," 

In his ** Ode to Liberty," he alludes to the tradition 
that Mona, the druidic stronghold, was long covered 
with an enchantment of mist — work of an angry- 
mermaid: 

" Mona, once hid from those who search the main, 
Where thousand elfin shapes abide." 

In Thomas Warton's ''Pleasures of Melancholy," 
Contemplation is fabled to have been discovered, when 
a babe, by a Druid 

" Far in a hollow glade of Mona's woods," 

and borne by him to his oaken bower, where she 

" — loved to lie 
Oft deeply listening to the rapid roar 
Of wood-hung Menai, stream of Druids old." 

Mason's " Caractacus" (1759) was a dramatic poem on 
the Greek model, with a chorus of British bards, and a 
principal Druid for choragus. The scene is the sacred 
grove in Mona. Mason got up with much care the 
descriptions of druidic rites, such as the preparation of 
the adder-stone and the cutting of the mistletoe with 
a golden sickle, from Latin authorities like Pliny, 
Tacitus, Lucan, Strabo, and Suetonius. Joseph Warton 
commends highly the chorus on " Death " in this piece, 
as well as the chorus of bards at the end of West's 
** Institution of the Garter." For the materials of his 
**Bard" Gray had to go no farther than historians 
and chroniclers such as Camden, Higden, and Matthew 



The School of Warton. 195 

of Westminster, to all of whom he refers. Following 
a now discredited tradition, he represents the last 
survivor of the Welsh poetic guild, seated, harp in 
hand, upon a crag on the side of Snowdon, and 
denouncing judgment on Edward I. for the murder 
of his brothers in song. 

But in 1764 Gray was incited, by the publication of 
Dr. Evans' '* Specimens," * to attempt a few transla- 
tions from the Welsh. The most considerable of 
these was *' The Triumphs of Owen," published 
among Gray's collected poems in 1768. This cele- 
brates the victory over the confederate fleets of Ire- 
land, Denmark, and Normandy, won about 1160 by a 
prince of North Wales, Owen Ap Griffin, ''the dragon 
son of Mona." The other fragments are brief but 
spirited versions of bardic songs in praise of fallen 
heroes: *'Caradoc" ''Conan," and "The Death of 
Hoel." They were printed posthumously, though 
doubtless composed in 1764. 

The scholarship of the day was not always accurate 
in discriminating between ancient systems of religion, 
and Gray, in his letters to Mason in 1758, when 
''Caractacus " was still in the works, takes him to 
task for mixing the Gothic and Celtic mythologies. 
He instructs him that Woden and his Valhalla belong 

* " Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards, 
translated into English," by Rev. Evan Evans, 1764. The speci- 
mens were ten in number. The translations were in English prose. 
The originals were printed from a copy which Davies, the author of 
the Welsh dictionary, had made of an ancient vellum MS. thought to 
be of the times of Edward II., Edward III., and Henry V. The 
book included a Latin " Dissertatio de Bardis," together with notes, 
appendices, etc. The preface makes mention of Macpherson's 
recently published Ossianic poems. 



196 cA History af English 'Romanticism. 

to *'the doctrine of the Scalds, not of the Bards"; 
but admits that, **in that scarcity of Celtic ideas we 
labor under," it might be permissible to borrow from 
the Edda, ** dropping, however, all mention of Woden 
and his Valkyrian virgins," and ''without entering 
too minutely on particulars"; or *' still better, to 
graft any wild picturesque fable, absolutely of one's 
own invention, upon the Druid stock." But Gray 
had not scrupled to mix mythologies in *' The Bard," 
thereby incurring Dr. Johnson's censure. "The 
weaving of the winding sheet he borrowed, as he 
owns, from the northern bards; but their texture, 
however, was very properly the work of female 
powers, as the art of spinning the thread of life in 
another mythology. Theft is always dangerous: 
Gray has made weavers of the slaughtered bards, by a 
fiction outrageous and incongruous." * Indeed Mallet 
himself had a very confused notion of the relation 
of the Celtic to the Teutonic race. He speaks con- 
stantly of the old Scandinavians as Celts. Percy 
points out the difference, in the preface to his trans- 
lation, and makes the necessary correction in the text, 
where the word Celtic occurs — usually by substituting 
" Gothic and Celtic " for the ** Celtic " of the original. 
Mason made his contribution to Runic literature, 
** Song of Harold the Valiant," a rather insipid ver- 
sification of a passage from the ''Knytlinga Saga," 
which had been rendered by Bartholin into Latin, 
from him into French by Mallet, and from Mallet into 
English prose by Percy. Mason designed it for in- 
sertion in the introduction to Gray's abortive history 
of English poetry. 

*" Life of Gray." 



The School of U^'arton. 197 

The true pioneers of the mediaeval revival were the^" 
Warton brothers. *'The school of Warton " v/as a • 
term employed, not without disparaging implications, 
by critics who had no liking for antique minstrelsy. 
Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of Thomas 
Warton, vicar of Basingstoke, who had been a fellow of 
Magdalen and Professor of Poetry at Oxford; which 
latter position was afterward filled by the younger of 
his two sons. It is interesting to note that a volume 
of verse by Thomas Warton, Sr., posthumously printed 
in 1748, includes a Spenserian imitation and trans- 
lations of two passages from the "Song of Ragner 
Lodbrog," an eleventh-century Viking, after the 
Latin version quoted by Sir Wm, Temple in his essay 
*' Of Heroic Virtue "; * so that the romantic leanings 
of the Warton brothers seem to be an instance of 
heredity. Joseph was educated at Winchester, — 
where Collins was his schoolfellow — and both of the 
brothers at Oxford. Joseph afterward became head- 
master of Winchester, and lived till 1800, surviving 
his younger brother ten years. Thomas was always 
identified with Oxford, where he resided for forty- 
seven years. He was appointed, in 1785, Camden 
Professor of History in the university, but gave no 
lectures. In the same year he was chosen to succeed 
Whitehead, as Poet Laureate. Both brothers were 
men of a genial, social temper. Joseph was a man of 
some elegance; he was fond of the company of young 
ladies, went into general society, and had a certain 
renown as a drawing-room v/it and diner-out. He 
used to spend his Christmas vacations in London, 
where he was a member of Johnson's literary club. 

*See Phelps' " English Romantic Movement," pp. 73, 141-42. 



198 zA History of English Romanticism. 

Thomas, on the contrary, who waxed fat and indolent 
in college cloisters, until Johnson compared him to 
a turkey cock, was careless in his personal habits and 
averse to polite society. He was the life of the com- 
mon room at Oxford, romped with the schoolboys 
when he visited Dr. Warton at Winchester, and was 
said to have a hankering after pipes and ale and the 
broad mirth of the taproom. Both Wartons had an 
odd passion for military parades; and Thomas — who 
was a believer in ghosts — used secretly to attend 
hangings. They were also remarkably harmonious in 
their tastes and intellectual pursuits, eager students 
of old English poetry, Gothic architecture, and British 
antiquities. So far as enthusiasm, fine critical taste, 
and elegant scholarship can make men poets, the 
Wartons were poets. But their work was quite un- 
original. Many of their poems can be taken to pieces 
and assigned, almost line by line and phrase by phrase, 
to Milton, Thomson, Spenser, Shakspere, Gray. 
They had all of our romantic poet Longfellow's 
dangerous gifts of sympathy and receptivity, without 
a tenth part of his technical skill, or any of his real 
originality as an artist. Like Longfellow, they loved 
the rich and mellow atmosphere of the historic past: 

" Tales that have the rime of age, 
And chronicles of eld. " 

The closing lines of Thomas Warton's sonnet, 
*' Written in a Blank Leaf of Dugdale's Monasticon " * 

* Wm. Dugdale published his "Monasticon Anglicanum," a 
history of English religious houses, in three parts, in 1655-62-73. 
It was accompanied with illustrations of the costumes worn by the 
ancient religious orders, and with architectural views. The latter. 



The School of War ton, 199 

—a favorite with Charles Lamb — might have been 
written by Longfellow: 

" Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways 
Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers." 

Joseph Warton's pretensions, as a poet, are much less 
than his younger brother's. Much of Thomas War- 
ton's poetry, such as his faceticB in the ** Oxford Sau- 
sage" and his '* Triumph of Isis," had an academic 
flavor. These we may pass over, as foreign to our 
present inquiries. So, too, with most of his annual 
laureate odes, '*0n his Majesty's Birthday," etc. 
Yet even these official and rather perfunctory per- 
formances testify to his fondness for what Scott calls 
'' the memorials of our forefathers' piety or splendor." 
Thus, in the birthday odes for 1787-88, and the New 
Year ode for 1787, he pays a tribute to the ancient 
minstrels and to early laureates like Chaucer and 
Spenser, and celebrates "the Druid harp" sounding 
"through the gloom profound of forests hoar"; the 
fanes and castles built by the Normans; and the 

" — bright hall where Odin's Gothic throne 
With the broad blaze of brandished falchions shone." 

But the most purely romantic of Thomas Warton's 
poems are ** The Crusade " and " The Grave of King 
Arthur." The former is the song which 

" The lion heart Plantagenet 
Sang, looking through his prison-bars," 

says Eastlake, were rude and unsatisfactory, but interesting to 
modern students, as "preserving representations of buildings, or 
portions of buildings, no longer in existence ; as, for instance, the 
campanile, or detached belfry of Salisbury, since removed, and the 
spire of Lincoln, destroyed in 1547." 



200 qA History of English %omanticism, 

when the minstrel Blondel came wandering in search 
of his captive king. The latter describes how 
Henry II., on his way to Ireland, was feasted at 
Cilgarran Castle, where the Welsh bards sang to him 
of the death of Arthur and his burial in Glastonbury 
Abbey. The following passage anticipates Scott: 

" Illumining the vaulted roof, 
A thousand torches flamed aloof; 
From massy cups, with golden gleam. 
Sparkled the red metheglin's stream: 
To grace the gorgeous festival, 
Along the lofty-windowed hall 
The storied tapestry was hung; 
With minstrelsy the rafters rung 
Of harps that with reflected light 
From the proud gallery glittered bright : 
While gifted bards, a rival throng, 
From distant Mona, nurse of song, 
From Teivi fringed with umbrage brown, 
From Elvy's vale and Cader's crov/n. 
From many a shaggy precipice 
That shades lerne's hoarse abyss, 
And many a sunless solitude 
Of Radnor's inmost mountains rude. 
To crown the banquet's solemn close 
Themes of British glory chose. " 

Here is much of Scott's skill in the poetic manipulation 
of place-names, g. g.y 

" Day set on Norham's castled steep. 
And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep. 
And Cheviot's mountains lone " — 

names which leave a far-resounding romantic rumble 
behind them. Another passage in Warton's poem 
brings us a long way on toward Tennyson's "wild 



The School of War ton. 201 

Tintagel by the Cornish sea " and his "island valley of 
Avilion." 

" O'er Cornwall's cliffs the tempest roared : 
High the screaminoj sea-mew soared: 
In Tintaggel's topmost tower 
Darksome fell the sleety shower : 
Round the rough castle shrilly sung 
The whirling blast, and wildly flung 
On each tall rampart's thundering side 
The surges of the tumbling tide, 
When Arthur ranged his red-cross ranks 
On conscious Camlan's crimsoned banks : 
By Mordred's faithless guile decreed 
Beneath a Saxon spear to bleed. 
Yet in vain a Paynim foe 
Armed with fate the mighty blow; 
For when he fell, an elfin queen, 
All in secret and unseen, 
O'er the fainting hero threw 
Her mantle of ambrosial blue, 
And bade her spirits bear him far. 
In Merlin's agate-axled car, 
To her green isle's enamelled steep 
Far in the navel of the deep." 

Other poems of Thomas Warton touching upon his 
favorite studies are the '' Ode Sent to Mr. Upton, on 
his Edition of the Faery Queene," the "Monody 
Written near Stratford-upon-Avon," the sonnets, 
"Written at Stonehenge," "To Mr. Gray," and "On 
King Arthur's Round Table, "and the humorous epistle 
which he attributes to Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, 
denouncing the bishops for their recent order that fast- 
prayers should be printed in modern type instead of 
black letter, and pronouncing a curse upon the author 



202 cA History of English Romanticism, 

of " The Companion to the Oxford Guide Book " for 
his disrespectful remarks about antiquaries. 

' ' May'st thou pore in vain 
For dubious doorways ! May revengeful moths 
Thy ledgers eat ! May chronologic spouts 
Retain no cypher legible ! May crypts 
Lurk undiscovered ! Nor may'st thou spell the names 
Of saints in storied windovi^s, nor the dates 
Of bells discover, nor the genuine site 
Of abbots' pantries ! " 

Warton was a classical scholar and, like most of the 
forerunners of the romantic school, was a trifle shame- 
faced over his Gothic heresies. Sir Joshua Reynolds 
had supplied a painted window of classical design for 
New College, Oxford; and Warton, in some com- 
plimentary verses, professes that those '* portraitures 
of Attic art" have won him back to the true taste;* 
and prophesies that henceforth angels, apostles, 
saints, miracles, martyrdoms, and tales of legendary 
lore shall — 

" No more the sacred window's round disgrace, 
But yield to Grecian groups the shining space. . , 
Thy powerful hand has broke the Gothic chain, 
And brought my bosom back to truth again. . . 
For long, enamoured of a barbarous age, 
A faithless truant to the classic page — 

♦"Verses on Sir Joshua Reynolds' Painted Window." Cf. Poe, 
•* To Helen " : 

" On desperate seas long wont to roam 
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, 
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home 
To the glory that was Greece, 
And the grandeur that was Rome." 



The School of Warton. 203 

Long have I loved to catch the simple chime 

Of minstrel harps, and spell the fabling rime ; 

To view the festive rites, the knightly play, 

That decked heroic Albion's elder day ; 

To mark the mouldering halls of barons bold, 

And the rough castle, cast in giant mould ; 

With Gothic manners, Gothic arts explore, 

And muse on the magnificence of yore. 

But chief, enraptured have I loved to roam, 

A lingering votary, the vaulted dome. 

Where the tall shafts, that mount in massy pride, 

Their mingling branches shoot from side to side ; 

Where elfin sculptors, with fantastic clew. 

O'er the long roof their wild embroidery drew ; 

Where Superstition, with capricious hand, 

In many a maze, the wreathed window planned, 

With hues romantic tinged the gorgeous pane, 

To fill with holy light the wondrous fane."* 

The application of the word ** romantic," in this 
passage, to the mediaeval art of glass-staining is 
significant. The revival of the art in our own day is 
due to the influence of the latest English school of 
romantic poetry and painting, and especially to Wil- 
liam Morris. Warton's biographers track his passion 
for antiquity to the impression left upon his mind by a 
visit to Windsor Castle, when he was a boy. He used 
to spend his summers in wandering through abbeys and 
cathedrals. He kept notes of his observations and is 
known to have begun a work on Gothic architecture, 

* This apology should be compared with Scott's verse epistle to 
Wm. Erskine, prefixed to the third canto of " Marmion." 
" For me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask 
The classic poet's well-conned task ? " etc. 
Scott spoke of himself in Warton's exact language, as a " truant to 
the classic page." 



204 <i/l History of English %omanticism, 

no trace of which, however, was found among his 
manuscripts. The Bodleian Library was one of his 
haunts, and he was frequently seen ''surveying with 
quiet and rapt earnestness the ancient gateway of 
Magdalen College." He delighted in illuminated 
manuscripts and black-letter folios. In his *' Observa- 
tions on the Faery Queene " * he introduces a digres- 
sion of twenty pages on Gothic architecture, and 
speaks lovingly of a "very curious and beautiful folio 
manuscript of the history of Arthur and his knights 
in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, written on 
vellum, with illuminated initials and head-pieces, in 
which we see the fashion of ancient armor, building, 
manner of tilting and other particulars." 

Another very characteristic poem of Warton's is the 
**Ode Written at Vale-Royal Abbey in Cheshire," a 
monastery of Cistercian monks, founded by Edward I. 
This piece is saturated with romantic feeling and 
written in the stanza and manner of Gray's " Elegy," 
as will appear from a pair of stanzas, taken at random: 

" By the slow clock, in stately-measured chime, 
That from the massy tower tremendous tolled, 
No more the plowman counts the tedious time, 
Nor distant shepherd pens the twilight fold. 

'* High o'er the trackless heath at midnight seen. 
No more the windows, ranged in long array 
(Where the tall shaft and fretted nook between 
Thick ivy twines), the tapered rites betray." 

It is a note of Warton's period that, though Fancy and 
the Muse survey the ruins of the abbey with pensive 
regret, ** severer Reason " — the real eighteenth-century 
divinity — " scans the scene with philosophic ken," and 

* See anif, pp. 99-101. 



The School of Warton. 205 

— being a Protestant — reflects that, after all, the monas- 
tic houses were " Superstition's shrine " and their dem- 
olition was a good thing for Science and Religion. 

The greatest service, however, that Thomas Warton 
rendered to the studies that he loved was his *' His- 
tory of English Poetry from the Twelfth to the Close 
of the Sixteenth Century." This was in three volumes, 
published respectively in 1774, 1777, and 1781. The 
fragment of a fourth volume was issued in 1790. A 
revised edition in four volumes was published in 1824, 
under the editorship of Richard Price, corrected, 
augmented, and annotated by Ritson, Douce, Park, 
Ashby, and the editor himself. In 187 1 appeared a new 
revision (also in four volumes) edited by W. Carew 
Hazlitt, with many additions, by the editor and by 
well-known English scholars like Madden, Skeat, 
Furnival, Morris, and Thomas and Aldis Wright. It 
should never be forgotten, in estimating the value of 
Warton's work, that he was a forerunner in this field. 
Much of his learning is out of date, and the modern 
editors of his history — Price and Hazlitt — seem to 
the discouraged reader to be chiefly engaged, in their 
footnotes and bracketed interpellations, in taking back 
statements that Warton had made in the text. The 
leading position, e. g., of his preliminary dissertation, 
'*0f the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe" — 
deriving it from the Spanish Arabs — has long since 
been discredited. But Warton's learning was wide, if 
net exact; and it was not dry learning, but quickened 
by the spirit of a genuine man of letters. Therefore, 
in spite of its obsoleteness in matters of fact, his his- 
tory remains readable, as a body of descriptive criti- 
cism, or a continuous literary essay. The best way to 



2o6 cA History of English Romanticism, 

read it is to read it as it was written — in the origi- 
nal edition — disregarding the apparatus of notes, 
which modern scholars have accumulated about it, but 
remembering that it is no longer an authority and 
probably needs correcting on every page. Read thus, 
it is a thoroughly delightful book, "a classic in its 
way," as Lowell has said, Southey, too, affirmed that 
its publication formed an epoch in literary history; 
and that, with Percy's ''Reliques," it had promoted, 
beyond any other work, the " growth of a better taste 
than had prevailed for the hundred years preceding." 

Gray had schemed a history of English poetry, but 
relinquished the design to Warton, to whom he com- 
municated an outline of his own plan. The ''Obser- 
vations on English Metre " and the essay on the poet 
Lydgate, among Gray's prose remains, are apparently 
portions of this projected work. 

Lowell, furthermore, pronounces Joseph Warton's 
''Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope" (1756) 
"the earliest public official declaration of war against 
the reigning mode." The new school had its critics, 
as well as its poets, and the Wartons were more effective 
in the former capacity. The war thus opened was by 
no means as internecine as that waged by the French 
classicists and romanticists of 1830. It has never been 
possible to get up a very serious conflict in England, 
upon merely aesthetic grounds. Yet the same oppo- 
sition existed. Warton's biographer tells us that the 
strictures made upon his essay were "powerful 
enough to damp the ardor of the essayist, who left 
his work in an imperfect state for the long space of 
twenty-six years," /. e., till 1782, when he published the 
second volume. 



The School of IVarton. 207 

Both Wartons were personal friends of Dr. John- 
son; they were members of the Literary Club and 
contributors to the /^//^rand the Adventurer. Thomas 
interested himself to get Johnson the Master's degree 
from Oxford, where the doctor made him a visit. 
Some correspondence between them is given in 
Boswell. Johnson maintained in public a respectful 
attitude toward the critical and historical work of the 
Wartons; but he had no sympathy with their anti- 
quarian enthusiasm or their liking for old English 
poetry. In private he ridiculed Thomas* verses, and 
summed them up in the manner ensuing: 

*' Wheresoe'er I turn my view, 
All is strange yet nothing new; 
Endless labor all along, 
Endless labor to be wrong; 
Phrase that time has flung away, 
Uncouth words in disarray, 
Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet, 
Ode and elegy and sonnet." 

And although he added, '* Remember that I love the 
fellow dearly, for all I laugh at him," this saving 
clause failed to soothe the poet's indignant breast, 
when he heard that the doctor had ridiculed his lines. 
An estrangement resulted which Johnson is said to 
have spoken of even with tears, saying " that Tom 
Warton was the only man of genius he ever knew who 
wanted a heart." 

Goldsmith, too, belonged to the conservative party, 
though Mr. Perry * detects romantic touches in *'The 
Deserted Village," such as the line, 

*" Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 397. 



2o8 t/1 History of English Romanticism, 

" Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe.' 



or 



On Tome's cliffs or Pambamarca's side.' 



In his "Enquiry into the Present State of Polite 
Learning" (1759) Goldsmith pronounces the age one 
of literary decay; he deplores the vogue of blank 
verse — which he calls an *' erroneous innovation" — 
and the *' disgusting solemnity of manner " that it has 
brought into fashion. He complains of the revival of 
old plays upon the stage. *'01d pieces are revived, 
and scarcely any new ones admitted. . . The public 
are again obliged to ruminate over those ashes of 
absurdity which were disgusting to our ancestors even 
in an age of ignorance. . . What must be done? 
Only sit down contented, cry up all that comes before 
us and advance even the absurdities of Shakspere. 
Let the reader suspend his censure; I admire the 
beauties of this great father of our stage as much as 
they deserve, but could wish, for the honor of our 
country, and for his own too, that many of his scenes 
were forgotten. A man blind of one eye should 
always be painted in profile. Let the spectator who 
assists at any of these new revived pieces only ask 
himself whether he would approve such a performance, 
if written by a modern poet. I fear he will find that 
much of his applause proceeds merely from the sound 
of a name and an empty veneration for antiquity. In 
fact the revival of those pieces of forced humor ^ far- 
fetched conceit and unnatural hyperbole which have been 
ascribed to Shakspere, is rather gibbeting than raising a 
statue to his memory." 

The words that I have italicized make it evident that 



The School of JVarton. 209 

what Goldsmith was really finding fault with was the 
restoration of the original text of Shakspere's plays, 
in place of the garbled versions that had hitherto been 
acted. This restoration was largely due to Garrick, 
but Goldsmith's language implies that the reform was 
demanded by public opinion and by the increasing 
*' veneration for antiquity." The next passage shows 
that the new school had its claque^ which rallied to 
the support of the old British drama as the French 
romanticists did, nearly a century later, to the support 
of Victor Hugo's melodrames.^ 

** What strange vamped comedies, farcical tragedies, 
or what shall I call them— speaking pantomimes have 
we not of late seen? . . . The piece pleases our 
critics because it talks Old English; and it pleases the 
galleries because it has ribaldry. . . A prologue 
generally precedes the piece, to inform us that it was 
composed by Shakspere or old Ben, or somebody else 
who took them for his model. A face of iron could 
not have the assurance to avow dislike; the theater 
has its partisans who understand the force of combi- 
nations trained up to vociferation, clapping of hands 
and clattering of sticks; and though a man might 
have strength sufficient to overcome a lion in single 
combat, he may run the risk of being devoured by an 
army of ants." 

Goldsmith returned to the charge in ** The Vicar of 
Wakefield" (1766), where Dr. Primrose, inquiring 
of the two London dames, **who were the present 
theatrical writers in vogue, who were the Drydens and 

* Lowell mentions the publication of Dodsley's "Old Plays," 
(1744) as, like Percy's " Reliques," a symptom of the return to the 
pa.st. Essay on " Gray." 



2IO c^ History of English ^Romanticism. 

Otways of the day," is surprised to learn that Dryden 
and Rowe are quite out of fashion, that taste has gone 
back a whole century, and that " Fletcher, Ben Jonson 
and all the plays of Shakspere are the only things that 
go down." **How," cries the good vicar, "is it 
possible the present age can be pleased with that 
antiquated dialect, that obsolete humor, those over- 
charged characters which abound in the works you 
mention? " Goldsmith's disgust with this affectation 
finds further vent in his "Life of Parnell " (1770). 
"He [Parnell] appears to me to be the last of that 
great school that had modeled itself upon the ancients, 
and taught English poetry to resemble what the 
generality of mankind have allowed to excel. . . His 
productions bear no resemblance to those tawdry 
things which it has, for some time, been the fashion to 
admire. . . His poetical language is not less correct 
than his subjects are pleasing. He found it at that 
period in which it was brought to its highest pitch of 
refinement; and ever since his time, it has been 
gradually debasing. It is, indeed, amazing, after 
what has been done by Dryden, Addison, and Pope, to 
improve and harmonize our native tongue, that their 
successors should have taken so much pains to involve 
it into pristine barbarity. These misguided innovators 
have not been content with restoring antiquated words 
and phrases, but have indulged themselves in the most 
licentious transpositions and the harshest construc- 
tions; vainly imagining that, the more their writings 
are unlike prose, the more they resemble poetry. 
They have adopted a language of their own, and call 
upon mankind for admiration. All those who do not 
understand them are silent; and those who make out 



The School of Warton. 2 1 1 

their meaning are willing to praise, to show they 
understand. " This last sentence is a hit at the alleged 
obscurity of Gray's and Mason's odes. 

To illustrate the growth of a retrospective habit in 
literature Mr. Perry* quotes at length from an 
essay ** On the Prevailing Taste for the Old English 
Poets," by Vicesimus Knox, sometime master of Tun- 
bridge school, editor of ** Elegant Extracts " and 
honorary doctor of the University of Pennsylvania. 
Knox's essays were written while he was an Oxford 
undergraduate, and published collectively in 1777. 
By this time the romantic movement was in full swing. 
" The Castle of Otranto " and Percy's ''Reliques " had 
been out more than ten years: many of the Rowley 
poems were in print; and in this very year, Tyrwhitt 
issued a complete edition of them, and Warton pub- 
lished the second volume of his "History of English 
Poetry." Chatterton and Percy are both mentioned 
by Knox. 

*' The antiquarian spirit," he writes, "which was 
once confined to inquiries concerning the manners, 
the buildings, the records, and the coins of the ages 
that preceded us, has now extended itself to those 
poetical compositions which were popular among our 
forefathers, but which have gradually sunk into oblivion 
through the decay of language and the prevalence of a 
correct and polished taste. Books printed in the 
black letter are sought for with the same avidity with 
which the English antiquary peruses a monumental 
inscription, or treasures up a Saxon piece of money. 
The popular ballad, composed by some illiterate 
minstrel, and which has been handed down by tradition 

* " Eighteenth Century Literature," pp. 401-03. 



212 e/f History of English l{omanticism. 

for several centuries, is rescued from the hands of the 
vulgar, to obtain a place in the collection of the man 
of taste. Verses which, a few years past, were thought 
worthy the attention of children only, or of the lowest 
and rudest orders, are now admired for that artless 
simplicity which once obtained the name of coarseness 
and vulgarity." Early English poetry, continues the 
essayist, '' has had its day, and the antiquary must not 
despise us if we cannot peruse it with patience. He 
who delights in all such reading as is never read, may 
derive some pleasure from the singularity of his taste, 
but he ought still to respect the judgment of mankind, 
which has consigned to oblivion the works which he 
admires. While he pores unmolested on Chaucer, 
Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve, let him not censure our 
obstinacy in adhering to Homer, Virgil, Milton, and 
Pope. . . Notwithstanding the incontrovertible merit 
of many of our ancient relics of poetry, I believe it 
may be doubted whether any one of them would be 
tolerated as the production of a modern poet. As a 
good imitation of the ancient manner, it would find its 
admirers; but, considered independently, as an origi- 
nal, it would be thought a careless, vulgar, inartificial 
composition. There are few who do not read Dr. 
Percy's own pieces, and those of other late writers, 
with more pleasure than the oldest ballad in the col- 
lection of that ingenious writer." Mr. Perry quotes 
another paper of Knox in which he divides the admirers 
of English poetry into two parties: *' On one side are 
the lovers and imitators of Spenser and Milton; and 
on the other, those of Dryden, Boileau, and Pope": in 
modern phrase, the romanticists and the classicists. 
Joseph Warton's *' Essay on Pope" was an attempt 



The School of IVarton. 213 

to fix its subject's rank among English poets. Fol- 
lowing the discursive method of Thomas Warton's 
" Observations on the Faerie Queene," it was likewise 
an elaborate commentary on all of Pope's poems 
seriati77i. Every point was illustrated with abundant 
learning, and there were digressions amounting to in- 
dependent essays on collateral topics: one, e. g.^ on 
Chaucer, one on early French metrical romances; 
another on Gothic architecture: another on the new 
school of landscape gardening, in which Walpole's 
essay and Mason's poem are quoted with approval, and 
mention is made of the Leasowes. The book was 
dedicated to Young; and when the second volume was 
published in 1782, the first was reissued in a revised 
form and introduced by a letter to the author from 
Tyrwhitt, who writes that, under the shelter of 
Warton's authority, '' one may perhaps venture to avow 
an opinion that poetry is not confined to rhyming 
couplets, and that its greatest powers are not displayed 
in prologues and epilogues." 

The modern reader will be apt to think Warton's 
estimate of Pope quite high enough. He places him, 
to be sure, in the second rank of poets, below Spenser, 
Shakspere, and Milton, yet next to Milton and above 
Dryden; and he calls the reign of Queen Anne the 
great age of English poetry. Yet if it be recollected 
that the essay was published only twelve years after 
Pope's death, and at a time when he was still commonly 
held to be, if not the greatest poet, at least the greatest 
artist in verse, that England had ever produced, it will 
be seen that Warton's opinions might well be thought 
revolutionary, and his challenge to the critics a bold 
one. These opinions can be best exhibited by quoting 



214 t^ History of English %omanticism. 

a few passages from his book, not consecutive, but 
taken here and there as best suits the purpose. 

''The sublime and the pathetic are the two chief 
nerves of all genuine poesy. What is there transcend- 
ently sublime or pathetic in Pope ? . . . He early 
left the more poetical provinces of his art, to become 
a moral, didactic, and satiric poet. . . And because I 
am, perhaps, unwilling to speak out in plain English, 
I will adopt the following passage of Voltaire, which, 
in my opinion, as exactly characterizes Pope as it does 
his model, Boileau, for whom it was originally designed. 
'Incapable peut-etre du sublime qui eleve Tame, et du 
sentiment qui I'attendrit, mais fait pour eclairer ceux 
a qui la nature accorda I'un et I'autre; laborieux, 
severe, precis, pur, harmonieux, il devint enfin le poete 
de la Raison.' ... A clear head and acute under- 
standing are not sufficient alone to make a poet; the 
most solid observations on human life, expressed witb 
the utmost elegance and brevity, are morality and not 
poetry. . . It is a creative and glowing imagination, 
i!cer spiritus ac vis, and that* alone, that can stamp 
a writer with this exalted and very uncommon 
character." 

Warton believes that Pope's projected epic on Bru- 
tus, the legendary founder of Britain, "would have 
more resembled the ' Henriade * 'than the 'Iliad,' or 
even the ' Gierusalemme Liberata'; that it would 
have appeared (if this scheme had been executed) how 
much, and for what reasons, the man that is skillful in: 
painting modern life, and the most secret foibles and] 
follies of his contemporaries, is, THEREFORE, dis- 
qualified for representing the ages of heroism, and thati 
simple life which alone epic poetry can gracefully de- 



The School of IVartoji. 215 

scribe. . . Wit and satire are transitory and perish- 
able, but nature and passion are eternal." The largest 
portion of Pope's work, says the author's closing sum- 
mary, ''is of the didactic, moral, and satiric kind; and 
consequently not of the most poetic species of poetry; 
whence it is manifest that good sense and judgment 
were his characteristical excellencies, rather than fancy 
and invention. . . He stuck to describing modern 
manners; but those manners, because they are familiar, 
uniform, artificial, and polished, are in their very na- 
ture, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. He gradu- 
ally became one of the most correct, even, and exact 
poets that ever wrote. . . Whatever poetical enthu- 
siasm he actually possessed, he withheld and stifled. 
The perusal of him affects not our minds with such 
strong emotions as we feel from Homer and Milton; 
so that no man of a true poetical spirit is master of 
himself while he reads them. . . He who would think 
the 'Faerie Queene,' ' Palamon and Arcite,* the 
'Tempest* or 'Comus,* childish and romantic might 
relish Pope. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly 
encomium to say, he is the great poet of Reason, the 
first of ethical authors in verse." 

To illustrate Pope's inferiority in the poetry of na- 
ture and passion, Warton quotes freely by way of con- 
trast, not only from Spenser and Milton, but from 
such contemporaries of his own as Thomson, Akenside, 
Gray, Collins, Dyer, Mason, West, Shenstone, and 
Bedingfield. He complains that Pope's "Pastorals" 
contains no new image of nature, and his "Windsor 
Forest " no local color; while " the scenes of Thomson 
are frequently as wild and romantic as those of Sal- 
vator Rosa, varied with precipices and torrents and 



2i6 <v^ History of English 'T^oinanticism. 

* castled cliffs ' and deep valleys, with piny mountains 
and the gloomiest caverns." ''When Gray published 
his exquisite ode on Eton College . . . little notice 
was taken of it; but I suppose no critic can be found 
that will not place it far above Pope's * Pastorals.* " 

A few additional passages will serve to show that 
this critic's literary principles, in general, were con- 
sciously and polemically romantic. Thus he pleads for 
the mot precis — that shibboleth of the nineteenth-cen- 
tury romanticists — for ^^ natural, little circumstances" 
against ** those who are fond of generalities" ; for the 
** lively painting of Spenser and Shakspere," as con- 
trasted with the lack of picturesqueness and imagery 
in Voltaire's '' Henriade." He praises ''the fashion 
that has lately obtained, in all the nations of Europe, 
of republishing and illustrating their old poets." * 
Again, commenting upon Pope's well-known triplet, 

" Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join 
The varying verse, the full -resounding line, 
The long majestic march and energy divine ! " 

he exclaims: "What! Did Milton contribute nothing 
to the harmony and extent of our language? . . . 
Surely his verses vary and resound as much, and dis- 
play as much majesty and energy, as any that can be 
found in Dryden. And we will venture to say that he 
that studies Milton attentively, will gain a truer taste 
for genuine poetry than he that forms himself on 
French writers and their followers." Elsewhere he 

* It is curious, however, to find Warton describing Villon as " a 
pert and insipid ballad-monger, whose thoughts and diction were as 
low and illiberal as his life," Vol. II. p. 338 (Fifth Edition, 1806). 



7he School of IVarton. 2 1 7 

expresses a preference for blank verse over rhyme, in 
long poems on subjects of a dignified kind.* 

'' It is perpetually the nauseous cant of the French 
critics, and of their advocates and pupils, that the 
English writers are generally incorrect. If correctness 
implies an absence of petty faults, this perhaps may 
be granted: if it means that, because their tragedians 
have avoided the irregularities of Shakspere, and 
have observed a juster oeconomy in their fables, there- 
fore the 'Athalia,' for instance, is preferable to 
* Lear,' the notion is groundless and absurd. Though 
the * Henriade ' should be allowed to be free from 
any very gross absurdities, yet who will dare to rank 
it with the ' Paradise Lost '? . . . In our own country 
the rules of the drama were never more completely 
understood than at present; yet what uninteresting, 
though faultless, tragedies have we lately seen! . . . 
Whether or no the natural powers be not confined and 
debilitated by that timidity and caution which is occa- 
sioned by a rigid regard to the dictates of art; or 
whether that philosophical, that geometrical and sys- 
tematical spirit so much in vogue, which has spread 
itself from the sciences even into polite literature, by 
consulting only reason, has not diminished and de- 
stroyed sentiment, and made our poets write from and 
to the head rather than the heart; or whether, lastly, 
when just models, from which the rules have neces- 

* Warton quotes the following bathetic opening of a " Poem in 
Praise of Blank Verse " by Aaron Hill, " one of the very first persons 
who took notice of Thomson, on the publication of * Winter ' " : 
" Up from Rhyme's poppied vale ! and ride the storm 
That thunders in blank verse J " 

- Vol. II. p. 186. 



2i8 zA History of English Romanticism. 

sarily been drawn, have once appeared, succeeding 
writers, by vainly and ambitiously striving to surpass 
those ... do not become stiff and forced." One 
of these uninteresting, though faultless tragedies was 
*'Cato," which Warton pronounces a "sententious 
and declamatory drama " filled with ** pompous Roman 
sentiments," but wanting action and pathos. He 
censures the tameness of Addison's ** Letter from 
Italy."* "With what flatness and unfeelingness has 
he spoken of statuary and painting! Raphael never 
received a more phlegmatic eulogy." He refers on 
the other hand to Gray's account of his journey to the 
Grande Chartreuse, f as worthy of comparison with one 
of the finest passages in the *' Epistle of Eloisa to 
Abelard." 

This mention of Addison recalls a very instructive 
letter of Gray on the subject of poetic style.J The 
romanticists loved a rich diction, and the passage 
might be taken as an anticipatory defense of himself 
against Wordsworth's strictures in the preface to the 
"Lyrical Ballads." "The language of the age," 
wrote Gray, " is never the language of poetry, except 
among the French, whose verse . . . differs in noth- 
ing from prose. Our poetry has a language peculiar 
to itself; to which almost everyone that has written 
has added something, by enriching it with foreign 
idioms and derivatives; nay, sometimes words of their 
own composition or invention. Shakspere and Milton 
have been great creators in this way . . . our lan- 
guage has an undoubted right to words of an hundred 
years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them 

* See anU, p. 57. f See an^e, p. 181. 

:j:To Richard West, April, 1742. 



The School of War ton, 219 

unintelligible. In truth Shakspere's language is one 
of his principal beauties; and he has no less advantage 
over your Addisons and Rowes in this, than in those 
other great excellencies you mention. Every word in 
him is a picture." He then quotes a passage from 
** Richard II.," and continues, ** Pray put me the 
following lines into the tongue of our modern dramat- 
ics. To me they appear untranslatable, and if this be 
the case, our language is greatly degenerated." 

Warton further protests against the view which 
ascribed the introduction of true taste in literature 
to the French. ** Shakspere and Milton imitated the 
Italians and not the French." He recommends also 
the reintroduction of the preternatural into poetry. 
There are some, he says, who think that poetry has 
suffered by becoming too rational, deserting fairyland, 
and laying aside "descriptions of magic and enchant- 
ment," and he quotes, a propos of this the famous 
stanza about the Hebrides in " The Castle of Indo- 
lence."* The false refinement of the French has made 
them incapable of enjoying "the terrible graces of our 
irregular Shakspere, especially in his scenes of magic 
and incantations. These Gothic charms are in truth 
more striking to the imagination than the classi- 
cal. The magicians of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser 
have more powerful spells than those of Apollonius, 
Seneca, and Lucan. The enchanted forest of Ismeni 
is more awfully and tremendously poetical than even 
the grove which Caesar orders to be cut down in 
Lucan (i. iii. 400), which was so full of terrors that, 
at noonday or midnight, the priest himself dared not 
approach it — 

** ' Dreading the demon of the grove to meet.* 
* See ante, p. 94. 



220 ^ History of English '^manticism. 

Who that sees the sable plumes waving on the pro- 
digious helmet in the Castle of Otranto, and the 
gigantic arm on the top of the great staircase, is not 
more affected than with the paintings of Ovid and 
Apuleius? What a group of dreadful images do we 
meet with in the Edda! The Runic poetry abounds 
in them. Such is Gray's thrilling Ode on the ' De- 
scent of Odin.' " 

Warton predicts that Pope's fame as a poet will ulti- 
mately rest on his ''Windsor Forest," his "Epistle 
of Eloisa to Abelard," and " The Rape of the Lock." 
To this prophecy time has already, in part, given 
the lie. Warton preferred ''Windsor Forest" and 
" Eloisa " to the " Moral Essays " because they be- 
longed to a higher kind of poetry. Posterity likes 
the *' Moral Essays " better because they are better of 
their kind. They were the natural fruit of Pope's 
genius and of his time, while the others were artificial. 
We can go to Wordsworth for nature, to Byron for 
passion, and to a score of poets for both, but Pope re- 
mains unrivaled in his peculiar field. In other words, 
we value what is characteristic in the artist; the one 
thing which he does best, the precise thing which he 
can do and no one else can. But Warton's mistake is 
significant of the changing literary standards of his 
age; and his essay is one proof out of many that the 
English romantic movement was not entirely without 
self-conscious aims, but had its critical formulas and 
its programme, just as Queen Anne classicism had. 



CHAPTER VII. 
Zhc <5otblc TRcvivaL 

One of Thomas Warton's sonnets was addressed ta 
Richard Hurd, afterward Bishop of Lichfield and Cov- 
entry, and later of Worcester. Hurd was a friend of 
Gray and Mason, and his "Letters on Chivalry and 
Romance " (1762) helped to initiate the romantic move- 
ment. They perhaps owed their inspiration, in part, 
to Sainte Palaye's ** Memoires sur I'ancienne Cheval- 
erie," the first volume of which was issued in 1759, 
though the third and concluding volume appeared 
only in 1781. This was a monumental work and, as a 
standard authority, bears much the same relation to 
the literature of its subject that Mallet's *' Histoire 
de Dannemarc " bears to all the writing on Runic 
mythology that was done in Europe during the eight- 
eenth-century. Jean Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte 
Palaye was a scholar of wide learning, not only in the 
history of mediaeval institutions but in old French 
dialects. He went to the south of France to familiar- 
ize himself with Provencal: collected a large library 
of Provencal books and manuscripts, and published in 
1774 his ** Histoire des Troubadours." Among his 
other works are a '* Dictionary of French Antiquities," 
a glossary of Old French, and an edition of ** Aucassin 
et Nicolete." Mrs. Susannah Dobson, who wrote 
''Historical Anecdotes of Heraldry and Chivalry'* 



2 22 A History of English '^manticism. 

(1795), made an English translation of Sainte Palaye's 
"History of the Troubadours" in 1779, and of his 
** Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry " in 1784. 

The purpose of Kurd's letters was to prove *' the 
pre-eminence of the Gothic manners and fictions, as 
adapted to the ends of poetry, above the classic." 
" The greatest geniuses of our own and foreign coun- 
tries," he affirms, *'such as Ariosto and Tasso in 
Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England, were 
seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; 
were even charmed by the Gothic romances. Was 
this caprice and absurdity in them? Or may there not 
be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited 
to the views of a genius and to the ends of poetry? 
And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too 
far in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it? " 
After a preliminary discussion of the origin of chiv- 
alry and knight-errantry and of the ideal knightly 
characteristics, *^ Prowess, Generosity, Gallantry, and 
Religion," which he derives from the military necessi- 
ties of the feudal system, he proceeds to establish a 
"remarkable correspondency between the manners of 
the old heroic times, as painted by their great roman- 
cer, Homer, and those which are represented to us in 
the books of modern knight-errantry." He compares, 
e. g.f the Lsestrygonians, Cyclopes, Circes, and Calyp- 
sos of Homer, with the giants, paynims, sorceresses 
encountered by the champions of romance; the Greek 
dotSot with the minstrels; the Olympian games with 
tournaments; and the exploits of Hercules and The- 
seus, in quelling dragons and other monsters, with the 
similar emprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul. 
The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic man- 



The Gothic %evivaL 223 

ners the preference over the heroic. Homer, he says, 
if he could have known both, would have chosen the 
former by reason of **the improved gallantry of the 
feudal times, and the superior solemnity of their 
superstitions. The gallantry which inspirited the 
feudal times was of a nature to furnish the poet with 
finer scenes and subjects of description, in every view, 
than the simple and uncontrolled barbarity of the Gre- 
cian. . . There was a dignity, a magnificence, a va- 
riety in the feudal, which the other wanted." 

An equal advantage, thinks Hurd, the romancers 
enjoyed over the pagan poets in the point of super- 
natural machinery. *' For the more solemn fancies of 
witchcraft and incantation, the horrors of the Gothic 
were above measure striking and terrible. The 
mummeries of the pagan priests were childish, but 
the Gothic enchanters shook and alarmed all 
nature. . . You would not compare the Canidia of 
Horace with the witches in 'Macbeth.' And what 
are Virgil's myrtles, dropping blood, to Tasso's en- 
chanted forest? . . . The fancies of our modern 
bards are not only more gallant, but . . . more sub- 
lime, more terrible, more alarming than those of the 
classic fables. In a word, you will find that the 
manners they paint, and the superstitions they adopt, 
are the more poetical for being Gothic." 

Evidently the despised " Gothick " of Addison — as 
Mr. Howells puts it — was fast becoming the admired 
''Gothic" of Scott. This pronunciamento of very 
advanced romantic doctrine came out several years 
before Percy's "Reliques" and "The Castle of 
Otranto." It was only a few years later than Thomas 
Warton's "Observations on the Faerie Queene" and 



2 24 A History of English ^manticism, 

Joseph's ** Essay on Pope," but its views were much 
more radical. Neither of the Wartons would have 
ventured to pronounce the Gothic manners superior 
to the Homeric, as materials for poetry, whatever, in 
his secret heart, he might have thought.* To John- 
son such an opinion must have seemed flat blasphemy. 
Hurd accounts for the contempt into which the 
Gothic had fallen on the ground that the feudal ages 
had never had the good fortune to possess a great 
poet, like Homer, capable of giving adequate artistic 
expression to their life and ideals. Carent vate sacro. 
Spenser and Tasso, he thinks, **came too late, and it 
was impossible for them to paint truly and perfectly 
what was no longer seen or believed. . . As it is, 
we may take a guess of what the subject v>ras capable 
of affording to real genius from the rude sketches we 
have of it in the old romancers. . . The ablest 
writers of Greece ennobled the system of heroic 
manners, while it was fresh and flourishing; and their 
works being masterpieces of composition, so fixed the 
credit of it in the opinion of the world, that no 
revolution of time and taste could afterward shake it. 
Whereas the Gothic, having been disgraced in their 
infancy by bad writers, and a new set of manners 
springing up before there were any better to do them 
justice, they could never be brought into vogue by the 
attempts of later poets." Moreover, *^the Gothic 
manners of chivalry, as springing out of the feudal 
system, were as singular as that system itself; so 
that when that political constitution vanished out of 
Europe, the manners that belonged to it were no 

* But compare the passage last quoted with the one from Warton's 
essay ante^ p. 219. 



The Gothic Revival. 225 

longer seen or understood. There was no example 
of any such manners remaining on the face of the 
earth. And as they never did subsist but once, and 
are never likely to subsist again, people would be led 
of course to think and speak of them as romantic and 
unnatural." 

Even so, he thinks that the Renaissance poets, 
Ariosto and Spenser, owe their finest effects not to 
their tinge of classical culture but to their romantic 
materials. Shakspere *' is greater when he uses 
Gothic manners and machinery, than when he em- 
ploys classical." Tasso, to be sure, tried to trim 
TDetween the two, by giving an epic form to his 
romantic subject-matter, but Hurd pronounces his 
imitations of the ancients ** faint and cold and 
almost insipid, when compared with his original 
fictions. . . If it was not for these lies [mag?ian- 
ima mensogna] of Gothic invention, I should scarcely 
be disposed to give the * Gierusalemme Liberata' 
a second reading." Nay, Milton himself, though 
finally choosing the classic model, did so only after 
long hesitation. ** His favorite subject was Arthur 
and the Knights of the Round Table. On this he had 
fixed for the greater part of his life. What led him 
to change his mind was partly, as I suppose, his 
growing fanaticism; partly his ambition to take a 
different route from Spenser; but chiefly, perhaps, the 
discredit into which the stories of chivalry had now 
fallen by the immortal satire of Cervantes. Yet we 
see through all his poetry, where his enthusiasm 
flames out most, a certain predilection for the legends 
of chivalry before the fables of Greece." Hurd says 
that, if the ** Faerie Queene " be regarded as a Gothic 



226 c/^ History of English %omanticism. 

poem, it will be seen to have true unity of design, 
a merit which even the Wartons had denied it. 
*' When an architect examines a Gothic structure by 
Grecian rules he finds nothing but deformity. But 
the Gothic architecture has its own rules by which, 
when it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its 
merit, as well as the Grecian." 

The essayist complains that the Gothic fables fell 
into contempt through the influence of French critics 
who ridiculed and disparaged the Italian romancers, 
Ariosto and Tasso. The English critics of the 
Restoration — Davenant, Hobbes, Shaftesbury — took 
their cue from the French, till these pseudo-classical 
principles "grew into a sort of a cant, with which 
Rymer and the rest of that school filled their flimsy 
essays and rumbling prefaces. . . The exact but 
cold Boileau happened to say something about the 
clinquant of Tasso," and ''Mr. Addison,* who gave 
the law in taste here, took it up and sent it about," so 
that 'Mt became a sort of watchword among the 
critics." ''What we have gotten," concludes the 
final letter of the series, "by this revolution, is a 
great deal of good sense. What we have lost is a 
world of fine fabling, the illusion of which is so grate- 
ful to the charmed spirit that, in spite of philosophy 
and fashion 'Faery' Spenser still ranks highest 
among the poets; I mean with all those who are 
either come of that house, or have any kindness 
for it." 

We have see that, during the classical period, 
" Gothic," as a term in literary criticism, was synony- 
mous with barbarous, lawless, and tawdry, Addison 
* See ante, p. 49. 



The Gothic T{evivaL 227 

instructs his public that **the taste of most of our 
English poets, as well as readers, is extremely 
Gothic."* After commending the French critics, 
Bouhours and Boileau, for their insistence upon good 
sense, justness of thought, simplicity, and natural- 
ness he goes on as follows: ** Poets who want this 
strength of genius, to give that majestic simplicity to 
nature which we so much admire in the works of the 
ancients, are forced to hunt after foreign ornaments, 
and not to let any piece of wit, of what kind soever, 
escape them. I look upon these writers as Goths in 
poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being 
able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old 
Greeks and Romans, have endeavored to supply its 
place with all the extravagances of an irregular fancy." 
In the following paper (No. 67,), an "allegorical 
vision of the encounter of True and False Wit," he 
discovers, ** in a very dark grove, a monstrous fabric, 
built after the Gothic manner and covered with in- 
numerable devices in that barbarous kind of sculp- 
ture." This temple is consecrated to the God of 
Dullness, who is *' dressed in the habit of a monk." 
In his essay " On Taste " (No. 409) he says, ** I have 
endeavored, in several of my speculations, to ban- 
ish this Gothic taste which has taken possession 
among us." 

The particular literary vice which Addison strove to 
correct in these papers was that conceited style which 
infected a certain school of seventeenth-century poe- 
try, running sometimes into such puerilities as ana- 
grams, acrostics, echo-songs, rebuses, and verses in 
the shape of eggs, wings, hour-glasses, etc. He 
* Spectator, No. 62. 



2 28 <v^ History of English %omanticism. 

names, as special representatives of this affectation^ 
Herbert, Cowley, and Sylvester. But it is significant 
that Addison should have described this fashion as 
Gothic. It has in reality nothing in common with the 
sincere and loving art of the old builders. He might 
just as well have called it classic; for, as he acknowl- 
edges, devices of the kind are to be found in the Greek 
anthology, and Ovid was a poet given to conceits. 
Addison was a writer of pure taste, but the coldness 
and timidity of his imagination, and the maxims of 
the critical school to which he belonged, made him 
mistake for spurious decoration the efflorescence of 
that warm, creative fancy which ran riot in Gothic 
art. The grotesque, which was one expression of 
this sappy vigor, was abhorrent to Addison. The art 
and poetry of his time were tame, where Gothic art 
was wild; dead where Gothic was alive. He could 
not sympathize with it, nor understand it. " Vous 
ne pouvez pas le comprendre; vous avez toujours hai 
la vie." 

I have quoted Vicesimus Knox's complaint that the 
antiquarian spirit was spreading from architecture and 
numismatics into literature.* We meet with satire 
upon antiquaries many years before this; in Pope, in 
Akenside's Spenserian poem "The Virtuoso (1737); 
in Richard Owen Cambridge's " Scribleriad " (1751): 

" See how her sons with generous ardor strive. 
Bid every long-lost Gothic art revive, . . . 
Each Celtic character explain, or show 
How Britons ate a thousand years ago; 
On laws of jousts and tournaments declaim, 
Or shine, the rivals of the herald's fame. 

* See cnU, p. 211. 



The Gothic %evival. 229 

But chief the Saxon wisdom be your care, 

Preserve their idols and their fanes repair; 

And may their deep mythology be shown 

By Seater's wheel and Thor's tremendous throne."* 

The most notable instance that we encounter of 
virtuosity invading the neighboring realm of literature 
is in the case of Strawberry Hill and '* The Castle 
of Otranto." Horace Walpole, the son of the great 
prime minister, Robert Walpole, was a person of 
varied accomplishments and undoubted cleverness. 
He was a man of fashion, a man of taste, and a man 
of letters; though, in the first of these characters, 
he entertained or affected a contempt for the last, 
not uncommon in dilettante authors and dandy 
artists, who belong to the i>eau monde or are other- 
wise socially of high place, teste Congreve, and 
even Byron, that *' rhyming peer." Walpole, as we 
have seen, had been an Eton friend of Gray and had 
traveled — and quarreled — with him upon the Conti- 
nent, Returning home, he got a seat in Parliament, 
the entree at court, and various lucrative sinecures 
through his father's influence. He was an assiduous 
courtier, a keen and spiteful observer, a busy gossip 
and retailer of social tattle. His feminine turn of 
mind made him a capital letter-writer; and his corrc- 

* " Works of Richard Owen Cambridge," pp. 198-99. Cambridge 
was one of the Spenserian imitators. See ante^ p. 89, note. In 
Lady Luxborough's correspondence with Shenstone there is much 
mention of a Mr. Miller, a neighboring proprietor, who was devoted 
to Gothic. On the appearance of "The Scribleriad," she writes 
(January 28, 1751), "I imagine this poem is not calculated to 
please Mr. Miller and the rest of the Gothic gentlemen; for this Mr. 
Cambridge expresses a dislike to the introducing or reviving tastes 
and fashions that are inferior to the modern taste of our country." 



230 nA History of English Romanticism. 

spondence, particularly with Sir Horace Mann, English 
ambassador at Florence, is a running history of back- 
stairs diplomacy, court intrigue, subterranean politics, 
and fashionable scandal during the reigns of the sec- 
ond and third Georges. He also figures as an historian 
of an amateurish sort, by virtue of his ** Catalogue of 
Royal and Noble Authors," '* Anecdotes of Painting,'* 
and *' Historic Doubts on Richard III." Our present 
concern with him, however, lies quite outside of these. 
It was about 1750 that Walpole, who had bought 
a villa at Strawberry Hill, on the Thames near Wind- 
sor, which had formerly belonged to Mrs. Chenevix, 
the fashionable London toy-woman, began to turn his 
house into a miniature Gothic castle, in which he is 
said to have "outlived three sets of his own battle- 
ments." These architectural experiments went on 
for some twenty years. They excited great interest 
and attracted many visitors, and Walpole may be re- 
garded as having given a real impetus to the revival of 
pointed architecture. He spoke of Strawberry Hill 
as a castle, but it was, in fact, an odd blend of eccle- 
siastical and castellated Gothic applied to domestic 
uses. He had a cloister, a chapel, a round tower, a 
gallery, a ''refectory," a stair-turret with Gothic 
balustrade, stained windows, mural scutcheons, and 
Gothic paper-hangings. Walpole's mock-gothic be- 
came something of a laughing-stock, after the true 
principles of mediaeval architecture were better un- 
derstood. Since the time when Inigo Jones, court 
architect to James I., came back from Italy, where he 
had studied the works of Palladio; and especially since 
the time when his successor, Sir Christopher Wren, 
had rebuilt St. Paul's in the Italian Renaissance style, 



The Gothic Revival. 231 

after the great fire of London in 1664, Gothic had 
fallen more and more into disuse. '* If in the history 
of British art," says Eastlake, ** there is one period 
more distinguished than another for the neglect of 
Gothic, it was certainly the middle of the eighteenth 
century." But architecture had this advantage over 
other arts, it had left memorials more obvious and im- 
posing. Mediaeval literature was known only to the 
curious, to collectors of manuscript romances and 
black-letter ballads. The study of mediaeval arts like 
tempera painting, illuminating, glass-staining, wood- 
carving, tapestry embroidery; of the science of 
blazonry, of the details of ancient armor and cos- 
tumes, was the pursuit of specialists. But West- 
minster Abbey, the Tower of London, Salisbury 
Cathedral, and York Minster, ruins such as Melrose 
and Fountain Abbeys, Crichton Castle, and a hundred 
others were impressive witnesses for the civilization 
that had built them and must, sooner or later, demand 
respectful attention. Hence it is not strange that the 
Gothic revival went hand in hand with the romantic 
movement in literature, if indeed it did not give it its 
original impulse. 

'* It is impossible," says Eastlake,* speaking of 
Walpole, **to peruse either the letters or the romances 
of this remarkable man, without being struck by the 
unmistakable evidence which they contain of his 
mediccval predilections. His * Castle of Otranto ' 
was perhaps the first modern work of fiction which 
depended for its interest on the incidents of a chival- 
rous age, and it thus became the prototype of that 
class of novel which was afterward imitated by Mrs. 
* " History of the Gothic Revival," p. 43. 



232 e/^ History of English l^manticism. 

Radcliffe and perfected by Sir Walter Scott. The 
feudal tyrant, the venerable ecclesiastic, the forlorn 
but virtuous damsel, the castle itself with its moats 
and drawbridge, its gloomy dungeons and solemn 
corridors, are all derived from a mine of interest 
which has since been worked more efficiently and to 
better profit. But to Walpole must be awarded the 
credit of its discovery and first employment." 

Walpole's complete works* contain elaborate illus- 
trations and ground plans of Strawberry Hill. East- 
lake gives a somewhat technical account of its 
constructive features, its gables, buttresses, finials, 
lath and plaster parapets, wooden pinnacles and, what 
its proprietor himself describes as his "lean windows 
fattened with rich saints." From this I extract only 
the description of the interior, which was "just what 
one might expect from a man who possessed a vague 
admiration for Gothic without the knowledge neces- 
sary for a proper adaptation of its features. Ceilings, 
screens, niches, etc., are all copied, or rather parodied, 
from existing examples, but with utter disregard for 
the original purpose of the design. To Lord Orford, 
Gothic was Gothic, and that sufficed. He would have 
turned an altar-slab into a hall-table, or made a cup- 
board of a piscina, with the greatest complacency, if 
it only served his purpose. Thus we find that in the 
north bed-chamber, when he wanted a model for his 
chimney-piece, he thought he could not do better 
than adopt the form of Bishop Dudley's tomb in 
Westminster Abbey. He found a pattern for the piers 
of his garden gate in the choir of Ely Cathedral." 

* '* Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford," in five volumes, 
1798. "A Description of Strawberry Hill," Vol. II. pp. 395-516. 



The Gothic %evtvaL 233 

The ceiling of the gallery borrowed a design from 
Henry VII. 's Chapel; the entrance to the same apart- 
ment from the north door of St. Alban's; and one side 
of the room from Archbishop Bourchier's tomb at 
Canterbury. Eastlake's conclusion is that Walpole's 
Gothic, ** though far from reflecting the beauties of 
a former age, or anticipating those which were 
destined to proceed from a re-development of the 
style, still holds a position in the history of English 
art which commands our respect, for it served to 
sustain a cause which had otherwise been well-nigh 
forsaken." 

James Fergusson, in his ''History of the Modern 
Styles of Architecture," says of Walpole's structures: 
*' We now know that these are very indifferent speci- 
mens of the true Gothic art, and are at a loss to 
understand how either their author or his contem- 
poraries could ever fancy that these very queer carv- 
ings were actual reproductions of the details of York 
Minster, or other equally celebrated buildings, from 
which they were supposed to have been copied." 
Fergusson adds that the fashion set by Walpole soon 
found many followers both in church and house archi- 
tecture, ''and it is surprising what a number of castles 
were built which had nothing castellated about them 
except a nicked parapet and an occasional window in 
the form of a cross." That school of bastard Gothic 
illustrated by the buildings of Batty Langley, and 
other early restorers of the style, bears an analogy 
with the imitations of old English poetry in the last 
century. There was the same prematurity in both, 
the same defective knowledge, crudity, uncertainty, 
incorrectness, feebleness of invention, mixture of 



234 ^ History of English l^pmanticism. 

ancient and modern manners. It was not until the 
time of Pugin * that the details of the mediaeval build- 
ing art were well enough understood to enable the 
architect to work in the spirit of that art, yet not as 
a servile copyist, but with freedom and originality. 
Meanwhile, one service that Walpole and his followers 
did, by reviving public interest in Gothic, was to 
arrest the process of dilapidation and save the crum- 
bling remains of many a half-ruinous abbey, castle, or 
baronial hall. Thus, ''when about a hundred years 
since, Rhyddlan Castle, in North Wales, fell into the 
possession of Dr. Shipley, Dean of St. Asaph, the 
massive walls had been prescriptively used as stone 
quarries, to which any neighboring occupier who 
wanted building materials might resort; and they are 
honey-combed all round as high as a pick-ax could 
reach." f *' Walpole," writes Leslie Stephen, ''is 
almost the first modern Englishman who found out 
that our old cathedrals were really beautiful. He dis- 
covered that a most charming toy might be made of 
medievalism. Strawberry Hill, with all its gimcracks, 
its pasteboard battlements and stained-paper carvings, 
was the lineal ancestor of the new law-courts. The 
restorers of churches, the manufacturers of stained 
glass, the modern decorators and architects of all 
varieties, the Ritualists and the High Church party, 
should think of him with kindness. . . That he was 

*Pugin's "True Principles of Gothic Architecture" was pub- 
lished in 1841. 

f "Sketches of Eminent Statesmen and Writers," A. Hayward 
(1880). In a note to " Marmion " (1808) Scott said that the ruins of 
Crichton Castle, remarkable for the richness and elegance of its 
stone carvings, were then used as a cattle-pen and a sheep-fold. 



The Gothic %evival. 235 

quite conscious of the necessity for more serious 
study, appears in his letters; in one of which, e. g., he 
proposes a systematic history of Gothic architecture 
such as has since been often executed." * Mr. 
Stephen adds that Walpole's friend Gray ** shared 
his Gothic tastes, with greatly superior knowledge." 

Walpole did not arrive at his Gothicism by the gate 
of literature. It was merely a specialized develop- 
ment of his tastes as a virtuoso and collector. The 
museum of curiosities which he got together at Straw- 
berry Hill included not only suits of armor, stained 
glass, and illuminated missals, but a miscellaneous 
treasure of china ware, enamels, faience, bronzes, 
paintings, engravings, books, coins, bric-a-brac, and 
memorabilia such as Cardinal Wolsey's hat. Queen 
Elizabeth's glove, and the spur that William III. wore 
at the Battle of the Boyne. Walpole's romanticism 
was a thin veneering; underneath it, he was a man of 
the eighteenth century. His opinions on all subjects 
were, if not inconsistent, at any rate notoriously 
whimsical and ill-assorted. Thus in spite of his 
admiration for Gray and his — temporary — interest in 
Ossian, Chatterton, and Percy's ballads, he ridiculed 
Mallet's and Gray's Runic experiments, spoke con- 
temptuously of Spenser, Thomson, and Akenside, 
compared Dante to ''a Methodist parson in bedlam," 
and pronounced '*A Midsummer Night's Dream" 
"forty times more nonsensical than the worst trans- 
lation of any Italian opera-books." f He said that 
poetry died with Pope, whose measure and manner he 

* "Hours in a Library," Second Series; article, " Horace Wal- 
pole." 

f Letter to Bentley, February 23, 1755. 



236 <iA History of English '^manticism, 

employed in his own verses. It has been observed 
that, in all his correspondence, he makes but a single 
mention of Froissart's " Chronicle," and that a sneer 
at Lady Pomfret for translating it. 

Accordingly we find, on turning to "The Castle of 
Otranto," that, just as Walpole's Gothicism was an 
accidental "sport" from his general virtuosity; so 
his romanticism was a casual outgrowth of his archi- 
tectural amusements. Strawberry Hill begat "The 
Castle of Otranto," whose title is fitly chosen, since it 
is the castle itself that is the hero of the book. The 
human characters are naught. " Shall I even confess 
to you," he writes to the Rev. William Cole (March 9, 
1765), " what was the origin of this romance? I waked 
one morning in the beginning of last June from a 
dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had 
thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural 
dream for a head filled, like mine, with Gothic story), 
and that, on the uppermost banister of a great stair- 
case, I saw a gigantic hand in armor. In the evening 
I sat down and began to write, without knowing in 
the least what I intended to say or relate. The work 
grew on my hands. . . In short, I was so engrossed 
with my tale, which I completed in less than two 
months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had 
drunk my tea, about six o'clock, till half an hour 
after one in the morning." 

"The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story," was 
published in 1765.* According to the title page, it 
was translated from the original Italian of Onuphrio 
Muralto — a sort of half-pun on the author's surname 

* Five hundred copies, says Walpole, were struck off December 24, 
1764. 



The Gothic %evtval. 237 

— by W. Marshall, Gent. This mystification was kept 
up in the preface, which pretended that the book had 
been printed at Naples in black-letter in 1529, and was 
found in the library of an old Catholic family in the 
north of England. In the preface to his second edi- 
tion Walpole described the work as "an attempt to 
blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the 
modern: declared that, in introducing humorous 
dialogues among the servants of the castle, he had 
taken nature and Shakspere for his models; and fell 
foul of Voltaire for censuring the mixture of buf- 
foonery and solemnity in Shakspere's tragedies. 
Walpole's claim to having created a new species of 
romance has been generally allowed. **His initiative 
in literature," says Mr. Stephen, ** has been as fruitful 
as his initiative in art. ' The Castle of Otranto,' 
and the 'Mysterious Mother,' were the progenitors 
of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, and probably had a 
strong influence upon the author of *Ivanhoe.' 
Frowning castles and gloomy monasteries, knights in 
armor and ladies in distress, and monks, and nuns, 
and hermits; all the scenery and characters that have 
peopled the imagination of the romantic school, may 
be said to have had their origin on the night when 
Walpole lay down to sleep, his head crammed full of 
Wardour Street curiosities, and dreamed that he saw 
a gigantic hand in armor resting on the banisters of 
his staircase." 

It is impossible at this day to take **The Castle of 
Otranto" seriously, and hard to explain the respect with 
which it was once mentioned by writers of authority. 
Warburton called it "a master-piece in the Fable, 
and a new species likewise. . . The scene is laid in 



238 e/f History of English Romanticism. 

Gothic chivalry; where a beautiful imagination, sup 
ported by strength of judgment, has enabled the 
reader to go beyond his subject and effect the full 
purpose of the ancient tragedy; i. e., to purge the 
passions by pity and terror, in coloring as great and 
harmonious as in any of the best dramatic writers." 
Byron called Walpole the author of the last tragedy * 
and the first romance in the language. Scott wrote of 
"The Castle of Otranto": *'This romance has been 
justly considered, not only as the original and model 
of a peculiar species of composition attempted and 
successfully executed by a man of great genius, but 
as one of the standard works of our lighter literature." 
Gray in a letter to Walpole (December 30, 1764), 
acknowledging the receipt of his copy, says: " It 
makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid 
to go to bed o* nights." Walpole's masterpiece can no 
longer make anyone cry even a little; and instead of 
keeping us out of bed, it sends us there — or would, if 
it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is 
tolerable about the book is its brevity, and a certain 
rapidity in the action. Macaulay, who confesses its 
absurdity and insipidity, says that no reader, probably, 
ever thought it dull. " The story, whatever its value 
may be, never flags for a single moment. There are 
no digressions, or unreasonable descriptions, or long 
speeches. Every sentence carries the action forward. 
The excitement is constantly renewed." Excitement 
is too strong a word to describe any emotion which 
** The Castle of Otranto " is now capable of arousing. 
But the same cleverness which makes Walpole's corre- 
spondence always readable saves his romance from the 
*" The Mysterious Mother," begun 1766, finished 1768. 



The Gothic l^evival. 239 

unpardonable sin — in literature — of tediousness. It 
does go along and may still be read without a too 
painful effort. 

There is nothing very new in the plot, which has all 
the stock properties of romantic fiction, as common in 
the days of Sidney's *' Arcadia " as in those of Sylvanus 
Cobb. Alfonso, the former lord of Otranto, had been 
poisoned in Palestine by his chamberlain Ricardo, who 
forged a will making himself Alfonso's heir. To make 
his peace with God, the usurper founded a church and 
two convents in honor of St. Nicholas, who ** appeared 
to him in a dream and promised that Ricardo's posterity 
should reign in Otranto until the rightful owner should 
be grown too large to inhabit the castle." When the 
story opens, this prophecy is about to be fulfilled. 
The tyrant Manfred, grandson of the usurper, is on the 
point of celebrating the marriage of his only son, when 
the youth is crushed to death by a colossal helmet 
that drops, from nobody knows where, into the court- 
yard of the castle. Gigantic armor haunts the castle 
piecemeal: a monstrous gauntlet is laid upon the 
banister of the great staircase; a mailed foot appears 
in one apartment; a sword is brought into the court- 
yard on the shoulders of a hundred men. And finally 
the proprietor of these fragmentary apparitions, in 
''the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magni- 
tude," throws down the walls of the castle, pronounces 
the words ''Behold in Theodore the true heir of Al- 
fonso," and with a clap of thunder ascends to heaven. 
Theodore is, of course, the young peasant, grandson 
of the crusader by a fair Sicilian secretly espoused en 
route for the Holy Land ; and he is identified by the 
strawberry mark of old romance, in this instance the 



240 <^ History of English Romanticism, 

figure of a bloody arrow impressed upon his shoulder. 
There are other supernatural portents, such as a skele- 
ton with a cowl and a hollow voice, a portrait which 
descends from its panel, and a statue that bleeds at 
the nose. 

The novel feature in the '* Castle of Otranto " was 
its Gothic setting; the *' wind whistling through the 
battlements"; the secret trap-door, with iron ring, by 
which Isabella sought to make her escape. ** An aw- 
ful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous 
regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that 
shook the doors she had passed, and which, grating on 
the rusty hinges, were re-echoed through that long 
labyrinth of darkness. The wind extinguished her 
candle, but an imperfect ray of clouded moonshine 
gleamed through a cranny in the roof of the vault and 
fell directly on the spring of the trap-door." But 
Walpole's medievalism was very thin. He took some 
pains with the description of the feudal cavalcade en- 
tering the castle gate with the great sword, but the 
passage is incorrect and poor in detail compared with 
similar things in Scott. The book was not an histori- 
cal romance, and the manners, sentiments, language, 
all were modern. AValpole knew little about the 
Middle Ages and was not in touch with their spirit. 
At bottom he was a trifler, a fribble; and his incurable 
superficiality, dilettantism, and want of seriousness, 
made all his real cleverness of no avail when applied to 
such a subject as '* The Castle of Otranto.* 

*" The Castle of Otranto" was dramatized by Robert Jephson, 
under the title " The Count of Narbonne," put on at Covent Garden 
Theater in I78i,"and afterward printed, with a dedication to Wal- 
pole. 



7he Gothic l^evival. 241 

Walpole's tragedy, ** The Mysterious Mother," has 
not even that degree of importance which secures his 
romance a niche in literary history. The subject was 
too unnatural to admit of stage presentation. Incest, 
when treated in the manner of Sophocles (Walpole jus- 
tified himself by the example of **OKdipus"), or even 
of Ford, or of Shelley, may possibly claim a place 
among the themes which art is not quite forbidden to 
touch; but when handled in the prurient and crudely 
melodramatic fashion of this particular artist, it is 
merely offensive. ** The Mysterious Mother," indeed, 
is even more absurd than horrible. Gothic machinery 
is present, but it is of the slightest. The scene of 
the action is a castle at Narbonne and the chatelaine 
is the heroine of the play. The other characters are 
knights, friars, orphaned damsels, and feudal retainers; 
there is mention of cloisters, drawbridges, theVaudois 
heretics, and the assassination of Henri III. and 
Henri IV. ; and the author's Whig and Protestant 
leanings are oddly evidenced in his exposure of priestly 
intrigues. 

** The Castle of Otranto " was not long in finding 
imitators. One of the first of these was Clara Reeve's 
'' Champion of Virtue " (1777), styled on its title-page 
"A Gothic Story," and reprinted the following year 
as '' The Old English Baron." Under this latter title 
it has since gone through thirteen editions, the latest 
of which, in 1883, gave a portrait of the author. Miss 
Reeve had previously published (1772) ** The Phoenix," 
a translation of **Argenis," "a romance written in 
Latin about the beginning of the seventeenth century, 
by John Barclay, a Scotchman, and supposed to contain 
an allegorical account of the civil wars of France during 



242 <^ History of English l{omanticism. 

the reign of Henry III. "* '' Pray," inquires the author 
of '* The Champion of Virtue " in her address to the 
reader, ** did you ever read a book called, * The Castle 
of Otranto' ? If you have, you will willingly enter with 
me into a review of it. But perhaps you have not 
read it? However, you have heard that it is an attempt 
to blend together the most attractive and interesting 
circumstances of the ancient romance and modern 
novel. . . The conduct of the story is artful and 
judicious; the characters are admirably drawn and 
supported; the diction polished and elegant; yet with 
all these brilliant advantages, it palls upon the 
mind. . . The reason is obvious; the machinery is so 
violent that it destroys the effect it is intended to ex- 
cite. Had the story been kept within the utmost verge 
of probability, the effect had been preserved. . . For 
instance, we can conceive and allow of the appearance 
of a ghost; we can even dispense with an enchanted 
sword and helmet, but then they must keep within 
certain limits of credibility. A sword so large as to 
require a hundred men to lift it, a helmet that by its 
own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into 
an arched vault, . . . when your expectation is 
wound up to the highest pitch, these circumstances 
take it down with a witness, destroy the work of imagi- 
nation, and, instead of attention, excite laughter. . . 
In the course of my observations upon this singular 
book, it seemed to me that it was possible to compose 
a work upon the same plan, wherein these defects 
might be avoided." 

Accordingly Miss Reeve undertook to admit only a 

* James Beattie, " Dissertation on Fable and Romance." " Ar- 
genis," was printed in 162 1. 



The Gothic l^evtvaL 243 

rather mild dose of the marvelous in her romance. 
Like Walpole she professed to be simply the editor of 
the story, which she said that she had transcribed or 
translated from a manuscript in the Old English lan- 
guage, a now somewhat threadbare device. The 
period was the fifteenth century, in the reign of Henry 
VI., and the scene England. But, in spite of the 
implication of its sub-title, the fiction is much less 
" Gothic " than its model, and its modernness of senti- 
rnent and manners is hardly covered with even the 
j faintest wash of mediaevalism. As in Walpole's book, 
there are a murder and a usurpation, a rightful heir 
lefrauded of his inheritance and reared as a peasant. 
There are a haunted chamber, unearthly midnight 
2^roans, a ghost in armor, and a secret closet with its 
skeleton. The tale is infinitely tiresome, and is full 
3f that edifying morality, fine sentiment and stilted 
dialogue — that *'old perfumed, powdered D'Arblay 
:onversation," as Thackeray called it — which abound 
in '* Evelina," '^Thaddeus of Warsaw," and almost all 
the fiction of the last quarter of the last century. 
Still it was a little unkind in Walpole to pronounce his 
'disciple's performance tedious and insipid, as he did. 

This same lady published, in 1785, a work in two 
volumes entitled *'The Progress of Romance," a sort 
of symposium on the history of fiction in a series of 
evening conversations. Her purpose was to claim for 
the prose romance an honorable place in literature; a 
place beside the verse epic. She discusses the defini- 
tions of romance given in the current dictionaries, 
such as Ainsworth's and Littleton's Narratio ficta — 
'Scriptum erotiatm — Splendida fabula; and Johnson's 
** A military fable of the Middle Ages — A tale of wild 



244 ^ History of English T^omanticism. 

adventures of war and love." She herself defines it 
as "An heroic fable," or ** An epic in prose." She 
affirms that Homer is the father of romance and thinks 
it astonishing that men of sense "should despise and 
ridicule romances, as the most contemptible of all 
kinds of writing, and yet expatiate in raptures on the 
beauties of the fables of the old classic poets — on 
stories far more wild and extravagant and infinitely 
more incredible." After reviewing the Greek 
romances, like Heliodorus' " Theagenes and Chari- 
clea," she passes on to the chivalry tales of the 
Middle Ages, which, she maintains, "were by no 
means so contemptible as they have been represented 
by later writers." Our poetry, she thinks, owes more 
than is imagined to the spirit of romance. " Chaucer 
and all our old writers abound with it. Spenser owes 
perhaps his immortality to it; it is the Gothic imagery 
that gives the principal graces to his work . . . 
Spenser has made more poets than any other writer of 
our country." Milton, too, had a hankering after 
the romances; and Cervantes, though he laughed 
Spain's chivalry away, loved the thing he laughed at 
and preferred his serious romance " Persiles and 
Sigismonda " to all his other works. 

She gives a list, with conjectural dates, of many 
mediaeval romances in French and English, verse and 
prose; but the greater part of the book is occupied 
with contemporary fiction, the novels of Richardson, 
Fielding, Smollett, Crebillon, Marivaux, Rousseau, 
etc. She commends Thomas Leland's historical 
romance "Longsword, Earl of Salisbury " (1762), as 
" a romance in reality, and not a novel: — a story like 
those of the Middle Ages, composed of chivalry, love, 



The Gothic %evivaL 245 

and religion." To her second volume she appended 
the '' History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt," englished 
from the French of Vattier, professor of Arabic to 
Louis XIV., who had translated it from a history of 
ancient Egypt written in Arabic. This was the source 
of Landor's poem, ''Gebir.'* When Landor was in 
Vv'ales in 1797, Rose Aylmer — 

" Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes, 
May weep but never see " — 

lent him a copy of Miss Reeve's '' Progress of 
Romance," borrowed from a circulating library at 
Swansea. And so the poor forgotten thing retains a 
vicarious immortality, as the prompter of some of the 
noblest passages in modern English blank verse and as 
associated with one of the tenderest passages in Lan- 
dor's life. 

Miss Reeve quotes frequently from Percy's *' Essay 
on the Ancient Minstrels," mentions Ossian and 
Chatterton and refers to Hurd, Warton, and other 
authorities. ** It was not till I had completed my 
design," she writes in her preface, *' that I read either 
Dr. Beattie's * Dissertation on Fable and Romance ' 
or Mr. Warton's * History of English Poetry.'" The 
former of these was an essay of somewhat more than a 
hundred pages by the author of **The Minstrel." It 
is of no great importance and follows pretty closely 
the lines of Kurd's *' Letters on Chivalry and 
Romance," to which Beattie repeatedly refers in his 
footnotes. The author pursues the beaten track in 
inquiries of the kind: discusses the character of the 
Gothic tribes, the nature of the feudal system, and the 
institutions of chivalry and knight-errantry. Romance, 



246 ^ History of English l{omanticism, 

it seems, was "one of the consequences of chivalry. 
The first writers in this way exhibited a species of 
fable different from all that had hitherto appeared. 
They undertook to describe the adventures of those 
heroes who professed knight-errantry. The world was 
then ignorant and credulous and passionately fond of 
wonderful adventures and deeds of valor. They 
believed in giants, dwarfs, dragons, enchanted castles, 
and every imaginable species of necromancy. These 
form the materials of the old romance. The knight- 
errant was described as courteous, religious, valiant, 
adventurous, and temperate. Some enchanters be- 
friended and others opposed him. To do his mis- 
tress honor, and to prove himself worthy of her, he 
was made to encounter the warrior, hew down the 
giant, cut the dragon in pieces, break the spell of the 
necromancer, demolish the enchanted castle, fly 
through the air on wooden or winged horses, or, with 
some magician for his guide, to descend unhurt through 
the opening earth and traverse the caves in the bottom 
of the ocean. He detected and punished the false 
knight, overthrew or converted the infidel, restored 
the exiled monarch to his dominions and the captive 
damsel to her parents; he fought at the tournament, 
feasted in the hall, and bore a part in the warlike 
processions." 

There is nothing very startling in these conclusions. 
Scholars like Percy, Tyrwhitt, and Ritson, who, as 
collectors and editors, rescued the fragments of 
ancient minstrelsy and gave the public access to con- 
crete specimens of mediaeval poetry, performed a more 
useful service than mild clerical essayists, such as 
Beattie and Hurd, who amused their leisure with 



The Gothic %evtval. 247 

general speculations about the origin of romance and 
whether it came in the first instance from the trouba- 
dours or the Saracens or the Norsemen. One more 
passage, however, may be transcribed from Beattie's 
"Dissertation," because it seems clearly a suggestion 
from ''The Castle of Otranto." ''The castles of the 
greater barons, reared in a rude but grand style of 
architecture, full of dark and winding passages, of 
secret apartments, of long uninhabited galleries, and 
of chambers supposed to be haunted with spirits, and 
undermined by subterraneous labyrinths as places of 
retreat in extreme danger; the howling of winds 
through the crevices of old walls and other dreary 
vacuities; the grating of heavy doors on rusty hinges 
of iron; the shrieking of bats and the screaming of 
owls and other creatures that resort to desolate or 
half-inhabited buildings; these and the like circum- 
stances in the domestic life of the people I speak of, 
would multiply their superstitions and increase their 
credulity; and among warriors who set all danger at 
defiance, would encourage a passion for wild adven- 
ture and difficult enterprise." 

One of the books reviewed by Miss Reeve is worth 
mentioning, not for its intrinsic importance, but for' 
its early date. " Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, An 
Historical Romance," in two volumes, and published 
two years before "The Castle of Otranto," is probably 
the first fiction of the kind in English literature. Its 
author was Thomas Leland, an Irish historian and 
doctor of divinity.* "The outlines of the following 
story," begins the advertisement, "and some of the 

*" The Dictionary of National Biography" miscalls it " Earl of 
CanUr&ury," and attributes it, though with a query, \.oJohn Leland. 



248 c/f History of English liptnanticism. 

incidents and more minute circumstances, are to be 
found in some of the ancient English historians." 
The period of the action is the reign of Henry III. 
The king is introduced in person, and when we hear 
him swearing **by my Halidome," we rub our eyes and 
ask, *' Can this be Scott?" But we are soon disabused, 
for the romance, in spite of the words of the advertise- 
ment, is very little historical, and the fashion of it is 
thinly wordy and sentimental. The hero is the son 
of Henry II. and Fair Rosamond, but his speech is 
Grandisonian. The adventures are of the usual kind: 
the dra7natis personce include gallant knights who go 
a-tilting with their ladies' gloves upon their casques, 
usurpers, villains, pirates, a wicked monk who tries to 
poison the hero, an oppressed countess, a distressed 
damsel disguised as a page, a hermit who has a cave 
in a mountain side, etc. The Gothic properties are 
few; though the frontispiece to the first volume 
represents a cowled monk raising from the ground the 
figure of a swooning knight in complete armor, in front 
of an abbey church with an image of the Virgin and 
Child sculptured in a niche above the door; and the 
building is thus described in the text: *'Its windows 
crowded with the foliage of their ornaments, and 
dimmed by the hand of the painter; its numerous 
spires towering above the roof, and the Christian 
ensign on its front, declared it a residence of devotion 
and charity." An episode in the story narrates the 
death of a father by the hand of his son in the Barons' 
War of Henry III. But no farther advantage is 
taken of the historic background afforded by this civil 
conflict, nor is Simon de Montfort so much as named 
in the whole course of the book. 



The Gothic l^vtval. 249 

Clara Reeve was the daughter of a clergyman. She 
lived and died at Ipswich (1725-1803). Walter Scott 
contributed a memoir of her to *'Ballantyne's Novelists' 
Library," in which he defended Walpole's frank use of 
the supernatural against her criticisms, quoted above, 
and gave the preference to Walpole's method.* She 
acknowledged that her romance was a 'Miterary de- 
scendant of *Otranto';" but the author of the latter, 
evidently nettled by her strictures, described "The 
Old English Baron," as " Otranto reduced to reason 
and probability," and declared that any murder trial 
at the Old Bailey would have made a more interesting 
story. Such as it is, it bridges the interval between 
its model and the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis' 
"Monk" (1795), and Maturin's "Fatal Revenge, or 
the Family of Montorio " (1807). f 

Anne Radcliffe — born Ward in 1764, the year of L^ 
"Otranto" — was the wife of an editor, who was 
necessarily absent from home much of the time until 
late at night. A large part of her writing was done 
to amuse her loneliness in the still hours of even- 
ing; and the wildness of her imagination, and the 
romantic love of night and solitude which pervades 
her books, are sometimes accounted for in this way. 
In 1809 it was currently reported and believed that 
Mrs. Radcliffe was dead. Another form of the rumor 
was that she had been made insane by continually 
poring over visions of horror and mystery. Neither 

*See also, for a notice of this writer, Julia Kavanagh's "English 
Women of Letters." 

f Maturin's " Melmoth the Wanderer " (1820) had some influence 
on the French romantic school and was utilized, in some particulars, 
by Balzac. 



250 ^ History of English %omanticism, 

report was true; she lived till 1823, in full posses- 
sion of her faculties, although she published nothing- 
after 1797. The circulation of such stories shows 
how retired, and even obscure, a life this very popular 
writer contrived to lead. 

It would be tedious to give here an analysis of these 
once famous fictions seriatim J^ They were very long, 
very much alike, and very much overloaded with 
sentiment and description. The plots were compli- 
cated and abounded in the wildest improbabilities and 
in those incidents which were once the commonplaces 
of romantic fiction and which realism has now turned 
out of doors: concealments, assassinations, duels, 
disguises, kidnapings, escapes, elopements, intrigues, 
forged documents, discoveries of old crimes, and identi- 
fications of lost heirs. The characters, too, were of 
the conventional kind. There were dark-browed, 
crime-stained villains — forerunners, perhaps, of Man- 
fred and Lara, for the critics think that Mrs. Rad- 
cliffe's stories were not without important influence 
on Byron, f There were high-born, penitent dames 
who retired to convents in expiation of sins which 
are not explained until the general raveling of clews 
in the final chapter. There were bravoes, banditti, 
feudal tyrants, monks, inquisitors, soubrettes, and 
simple domestics a la Bianca, in Walpole's romance. 
The lover was of the type adored by our great-grand- 

* Following is a list of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances : " The Castles 
of Athlin and Dunbayne " (1789) ; "Sicilian Romance" (1790); 
" Romance of the Forest " {1791) ; " Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) ,' 
"The Italian" (1797); "Gaston de Blondville" (1826). Collec- 
tions of her poems were published in 1816, 1834, and 1845. 

f See " Childe Harold," canto iv, xviii. 



The Gothic Revival. 251 

mothers, handsome, melancholy, passionate, respect- 
ful but desperate, a user of most choice English; with 
large black eyes, smooth white forehead, and jetty 
curls, now sunk, Mr. Perry says, to the covers of 
prune boxes. The heroine, too, was sensitive and 
melancholy. When alone upon the seashore or in 
the mountains, at sunset or twilight, or under the 
midnight moon, or when the wind is blowing, she 
overflows into stanza or sonnet, **To Autumn," **To 
Sunset," ''To the Bat," *' To the Nightingale," **To 
the Winds," **To Melancholy," " Song of the Even- 
ing Hour." We have heard this pensive music draw- 
ing near in the strains of the Miltonic school, but in 
Mrs. Radcliffe the romantic gloom is profound and all- 
pervading. In what pastures she had fed is manifest 
from the verse captions that head her chapters, taken 
mainly from Blair, Thomson, Warton, Gray, Collins, 
Beattie, Mason, and Walpole's ** Mysterious Mother." 
Here are a few stanzas from her ode ** To Melancholy " : 

*' Spirit of love and sorrow, hail! 

Thy solemn voice from far I hear. 

Mingling with evening's dying gale: 

Hail, with thy sadly pleasing tear! 

'* O at this still, this lonely hour — 

Thine own sweet hour of closing day — 
Awake thy lute, whose charmful power 
Shall call up fancy to obey : 

*' To paint the wild, romantic dream 
That meets the poet's closing eye, 
As on the bank of shadowy stream 
He breathes to her the fervid sigh. 



252 c/^ History of English l{omanticism. 

*' O lonely spirit, let thy song 

Lead me through all thy sacred haunt. 
The minster's moonlight aisles along 

Where spectres raise the midnight chant." 

In Mrs. Radcliffe's romances we find a tone that is 
absent from Walpole's: romanticism plus sentimental- 
ism. This last element had begun to infuse itself into 
general literature about the middle of the century, as a 
protest and reaction against the emotional coldness of 
the classical age. It announced itself in Richardson, 
Rousseau, and the youthful Goethe; in the comidie 
larmoyantCy both French and English; found its clever- 
est expression in Sterne, and then, becoming a uni- 
versal vogue, deluged fiction with productions like 
Mackenzie's *'Man of Feeling," Miss Burney's 
** Evelina," and the novels of Jane Porter and Mrs. 
Opie. Thackeray said that there was more crying in 
**Thaddeus of Warsaw" than in any novel he ever 
remembered to have read.* Emily, in the "Myster- 
ies of Udolpho " cannot see the moon, or hear a guitar 
or an organ or the murmur of the pines, without 
weeping. Every page is bedewed with the tear of 
sensibility; the whole volume is damp with it, and 
ever and anon a chorus of sobs goes up from the 
entire company. Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines are all de- 
scendants of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, but under 
more romantic circumstances. They are beset with a 
thousand difficulties; carried off by masked ruffians, 
immured in convents, held captive in robber castles, 
encompassed with horrors natural and supernatural^ 

*" Roundabout Papers," "A Peal of Bells." "Monk" Lewis 
wrote at sixteen a burlesque novel, " Effusions of Sensibility," which 
remained in MS. 



The Gothic %evival. 253 

persecuted, threatened with murder and with rape. 
But though perpetually sighing, blushing, trembling, 
weeping, fainting, they have at bottom a kind of 
toughness that endures through all. They rebuke the 
wicked in stately language, full of noble sentiments 
and moral truths. They preserve the most delicate 
feelings of propriety in situations the most discourag- 
ing. Emily, imprisoned in the gloomy castle of Udol- 
pho, in the power of ruffians whose brawls and orgies 
fill night and day with horror, in hourly fear for her 
virtue and her life, sends for the lord of the castle, — 
whom she believes to have murdered her aunt, — and 
reminds him that, as her protectress is now dead, it 
would not be proper for her to stay any longer under 
his roof thus unchaperoned, and will he please, there- 
fore, send her home? 

Mrs.Radcliffe's fictions are romantic, but not usually 
mediaeval in subject. In the " Mysteries of Udolpho," 
the period of the action is the end of the sixteenth 
century; in the "Romance of the Forest," 1658; 
in ''The Italian," about 1760. But her machinery 
is prevailingly Gothic and the real hero of the story 
is commonly, as in Walpole, some haunted building. 
In the " Mysteries of Udolpho " it is a castle in the 
Apennines; in the ''Romance of the Forest," a de- 
serted abbey in the depth of the woods; in "The 
Italian," the cloister of the Black Penitents. The 
moldering battlements, the worm-eaten tapestries, 
the turret staircases, secret chambers, underground 
passages, long, dark corridors where the wind howls 
dismally, and distant doors which slam at midnight 
all derive from "Otranto." So do the supernatural 
fears which haunt these abodes of desolation; the 



254 <v^ History of English 'T^manticism, 

strains of mysterious music, the apparitions which 
glide through the shadowy apartments, the hollow 
voices that warn the tyrant to beware. But her 
method here is quite different from Walpole's; she 
tacks a natural explanation to every unearthly sight or 
sound. The hollow voices turn out to be ventrilo- 
quism; the figure of a putrefying corpse which Emily 
sees behind the black curtain in the ghost chamber at 
Udolpho is only a wax figure, contrived as a 7nemento 
mori for a former penitent. After the reader has once 
learned this trick he refuses to be imposed upon again, 
and, whenever he encounters a spirit, feels sure that 
a future chapter will embody it back into flesh and 
blood. 

There is plenty of testimony to the popularity of 
these romances. Thackeray says that a lady of his 
acquaintance, an inveterate novel reader, names Val- 
ancourt as one of the favorite heroes of her youth. 
** * Valancourt? And who was he?' cry the young 
people. Valancourt, my dears, was the hero of one of 
the most famous romances which ever was published 
in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valan- 
court made your young grandmammas' gentle hearts 
to beat with respectful sympathy. He and his glory 
have passed away. . . Enquire at Mudie's or the 
London Library, who asks for the * Mysteries of 
Udolpho ' now." * Hazlitt said that he owed to Mrs. 

♦"O Radcliffe, thou once wert the charmer 
Of girls who sat reading all night : 
Thy heroes were striplings in armor, 
Thy heroines, damsels in white." 

— Songs, Ballads and other Poems. 
By Thos. Haynes Bayly, London, 1857, p. 141. 



The Gothic %evival. 255 

Radcliffe his love of moonlight nights, autumn leaves, 
and decaying ruins. It was, indeed, in the melo- 
dramatic manipulation of landscape that this artist 
was most original. ''The scenes that savage Rosa 
dashed " seem to have been her model, and critics who 
were fond of analogy called her the Salvator Rosa of 
fiction. It is here that her influence on Byron and 
Chateaubriand is most apparent.* Mrs. Radcliffe's 
scenery is not quite to our modern taste, any more 
than are Salvator's paintings. Her Venice by moon- 
light, her mountain gorges with their black pines and 
foaming torrents, are not precisely the Venice and the 
Alps of Ruskin; rather of the operatic stage. Still 
they are impressive in their way, and in this depart- 
ment she possessed genuine poetic feeling and a real 
! mastery of the art of painting in distemper. Witness 
the picture of the castle of Udolpho, on Emily's first 
sight of it, and the hardly less striking description, in 
[the ** Romance of the Forest," of the ruined abbey 

" A novel now is nothing more 
Than an old castle and a creaking door, 

A distant, hovel, 
Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light, 
Old armor and a phantom all in white. 
And there's a novel." 

—George Colman, *' T^ie Will:' 

* Several of her romances were dramatized and translated into 
French. It is curious, by the way, to find that Goethe was not 
unaware of Walpole's story. See his quatrain " Die Burg von 
Otranto," first printed in 1837. 

" Sind die Zimmer sammtlich besetzt der Burg von Otranto : 
Kommt, voll innigen Grimmes, der erste Riesenbesitzer 
Stuckweis an, und verdrangt die neuen falschen Bewohner. 
"Wehe ! den Fliehenden, weh ! den Bleibenden also geschiet es." 



256 c/^ History of English l^pmanticism. 

in which the La Motte family take refuge: "He 
approached and perceived the Gothic remains of an 
abbey: it stood on a kind of rude lawn, overshadowed 
by high and spreading trees, which seemed coeval 
with the building, and diffused a romantic gloom 
around. The greater part of the pile appeared to be 
sinking into ruins, and that which had withstood the 
ravages of time showed the remaining features of the 
fabric more awful in decay. The lofty battlements, 
thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished 
and become the residence of birds of prey. Huge 
fragments of the eastern tower, which was almost 
demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass, that 
waved slowly in the breeze. 'The thistle shook its 
lonely head: the moss whistled to the wind.'* A 
Gothic gate, richly ornamented with fretwork, which 
opened into the main body of the edifice, but which 
was now obstructed with brushwood, remained entire. 
Above the vast and magnificent portal of this gate 
arose a window of the same order, whose pointed 
arches still exhibited fragments of stained glass, once 
the pride of monkish devotion. La Motte, thinking 
it possible it might yet shelter some human being, 
advanced to the gate and lifted a massy knocker. 
The hollow sounds rung through the emptiness of the 
place. After waiting a few minutes, he forced back 
the gate, which was heavy with iron-work, and creaked 
harshly on its hinges. . . From this chapel he passed 
into the nave of the great church, of which one window, 
more perfect than the rest, opened upon a long vista 
of the forest, through which was seen the rich color- 
ing of evening, melting by imperceptible gradations 
into the solemn gray of upper air." 
* Ossian. 



7k e Gothic Revival. 257 

Mrs. Radcliffe never was in Italy or Switzerland or 
the south of France; she divined the scenery of her 
romances from pictures and descriptions at second 
hand. But she accompanied her husband in excur- 
sions to the Lakes and other parts of England, and in 
1794 made the tour of the Rhine.* The passages in 
her diary, recording these travels, are much superior 
in the truthfulness and local color of their nature 
sketching to anything in her novels. Mrs. Radcliffe 
is furthermore to be credited with a certain skill in 
producing terror, by the use of that favorite weapon 
in the armory of the romanticists, mystery. If she 
did not invent a new shudder, as Hugo said of Baude- 
laire, she gave at least a new turn to the old-fashioned 
ghost story. She creates in her readers a feeling of 
impending danger, suspense, foreboding. There is a 
sense of unearthly presences in these vast, empty 
rooms; the silence itself is ominous; echoes sound 
like footfalls, ghostly shadows lurk in dark corners, 
whispers come from behind the arras, as it stirs in the 
gusts of wind.f The heroine is afraid to look in the 
glass lest she should see another face there beside her 
own; her lamp expires and leaves her in the dark just 
as she is coming to the critical point in the manu- 
script which she has found in an old chest, etc., etc. 
But the tale loses its impressiveness as soon as it 
strays beyond the shade of the battlements. The 

*See her "Journey through Holland," etc. (1795). 
•f- Cf. Keats, " The Eve of Saint Agnes ": 

'* The arras rich with hunt and horse and hound 
Fluttered in the besieging wind's uproar, 
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor." 



258 <iA History of English 'Romanticism. 

Gothic castle or priory is still, as in Walpole, the 
nucleus of the story. 

Two of these romances, the earliest and the latest, 
though they are the weakest of the series, have a spe- 
cial interest for us as affording points of comparison 
with the Waverley novels. ** The Castles of Athlin and 
Dunbayne" is the narrative of a feud between two 
Highland clans, and its scene is the northeastern coast 
of Scotland, *'in the most romantic part of the High- 
lands," where the castle of Athlin — like Uhland's 
** Schloss am Meer " — stood ** on the summit of a rock 
whose base was in the sea." This was a fine place for 
storms. " The winds burst in sudden squalls over the 
deep and dashed the foaming waves against the rocks 
with inconceivable fury. The spray, notwithstanding 
the high situation of the castle, flew up with violence 
against the windows. . . The moon shone faintly by 
intervals, through broken clouds, upon the waters, 
illumining the white foam which burst around. . . 
The surges broke on the distant shores in deep 
resounding murmurs, and the solemn pauses between 
the stormy gusts filled the mind with enthusiastic 
awe." Perhaps the description slightly reminds of the 
picture, in " Marmion," of Tantallon Castle, the hold 
of the Red Douglases on the German Ocean, a little 
north of Berwick, whose frowning towers have re- 
cently done duty again in Stevenson's *' David Bal- 
four." The period of the action is but vaguely 
indicated; but, as the weapons used in the attack on 
the castle are bows and arrows, we may regard the 
book as mediaeval in intention. Scott says that the 
scene of the romance was Scotland in the dark ages, 
and complains that the author evidently knew nothing 



7he Gothic 'Revival. 259 

of Scottish life or scenery. This is true; her castles 
might have stood anywhere. There is no mention of 
the pipes or the plaid. Her rival chiefs are not Gaelic 
caterans, but just plain feudal lords. Her baron of 
Dunbayne is like any other baron; or rather, he is 
unlike any baron that ever was on sea or land or any- 
where else except in the pages of a Gothic romance. 

** Gaston de Blondville " was begun in 1802 and pub- 
lished posthumously in 1836, edited by Sergeant Tal- 
fourd. Its inspiring cause was a visit which the 
author made in the autumn of 1802 to Warwick Castle 
and the ruins of Kenilworth. The introduction has 
the usual fiction of an old manuscript found in an 
oaken chest dug up from the foundation of a chapel 
of Black Canons at Kenilworth: a manuscript richly 
illuminated with designs at the head of each chapter — 
which are all duly described — and containing a '*trew 
chronique of what passed at Killingworth, in Ardenn, 
when our Soveren Lord the Kynge kept ther his Fest 
I of Seynt Michel: with ye marveylous accident that 
ther befel at the solempnissacion of the marriage of 
Gaston de Blondeville. With divers things curious to 
be known thereunto purtayning. With an account of 
the grete Turney there held in the year MCCLVI. 
Changed out of the Norman tongue by Grymbald, 
Monk of Senct Marie Priori in Killingworth." Chat- 
terton's forgeries had by this time familiarized the 
public with imitations of early English. The finder 
of this manuscript pretends to publish a modernized 
version of it, while endeavoring "to preserve some- 
what of the air of the old style." This he does by 
a poor reproduction, not of thirteenth-century, but of 
sixteenth-century English, consisting chiefly in inver- 



26o zA History of English Romanticism. 

sions of phrase and the occasional use of a certes or 
naithless. Two words in particular seem to have 
struck Mrs. Radcliffe as most excellent archaisms: 
ycho?i and his-self, which she introduces at every turn. 

*' Gaston de Blondville," then, is a tale of the time 
of Henry III. The king himself is a leading figure 
and so is Prince Edward. Other historical personages 
are brought in, such as Simon de Montfort and Marie 
de France, but little use is made of them. The book 
is not indeed, in any sense, an historical novel like 
Scott's " Kenilworth," the scene of which is the same, 
and which was published in 182 1, five years before 
Mrs. Radcliffe's. The story is entirely fictitious. What 
differences it from her other romances is the con- 
scious attempt to portray feudal manners. There are 
elaborate descriptions of costumes, upholstery, archi- 
tecture, heraldic bearings, ancient military array, a 
tournament, a royal hunt, a feast in the great hall at 
Kenilworth, a visit of state to Warwick Castle, and 
the session of a baronial court. The ceremony of 
the " voide," when the king took his spiced cup, is 
rehearsed with a painful accumulation of particulars. 
For all this she consulted Leland's *' Collectanea," 
Warton's ** History of English Poetry," the "House- 
hold Book of Edward IV.," Pegge's '* Dissertation on 
the Obsolete Office of Esquire of the King's Body," 
the publications of the Society of Antiquaries and simi- 
lar authorities, with results that are infinitely tedious. 
Walter Scott's archaeology is not always correct, nor 
his learning always lightly borne; but, upon the whole, 
he had the art to make his cumbrous materials con- 
tributory to his story rather than obstructive of it. 

In these two novels we meet again all the familiar 



The Gothic ^vivaL 261 

apparatus of secret trap-doors, sliding panels, spiral 
staircases in the thickness of the walls, subterranean 
vaults conducting to a neighboring priory or a cavern 
in the forest, ranges of deserted apartments where the 
moon looks in through mullioned casements, ruinous 
turrets around which the night winds moan and 
howl. Here, too, once more are the wicked uncle who 
seizes upon the estates of his deceased brother's wife, 
and keeps her and her daughter shut up in his dun- 
geon for the somev/hat long period of eighteen years; 
the heroine who touches her lute and sings in pensive 
mood, till the notes steal to the ear of the young earl 
imprisoned in the adjacent tower; the maiden who is 
carried off on horseback by bandits, till her shrieks 
bring ready aid; the peasant lad who turns out to be 
the baron's heir. **His surprise was great when the 
baroness, reviving, fixed her eyes mournfully upon 
him and asked him to uncover his arm." Alas! the 
surprise is not shared by the reader, when *' ' It is — it 
is my Philip! ' said she, with strong emotion; ' I have 
indeed found my long-lost child: that strawberry,' "* 
etc., etc. ** Gaston de Blondville "has a ghost which 
is a real ghost — not explained away in the end accord- 
ing to Mrs. Radcliffe's custom. It is the spirit of 
Reginald de Folville, Knight Hospitaller of St. John, 
murdered in the Forest of Arden by Gaston de Blond- 
ville and the prior of St. Mary's. He is a most 
robust apparition, and is by no means content with 
revisiting the glimpses of the moon, but goes in and 
out at all hours of the day, and so often as to become 
somewhat of a bore. He ultimately destroys both 
first and second murderer: one in his cell, the other 
* •• Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne." 



262 ft/f History of English %omantidsm. 

in open tournament, where his exploits as a mysterious 
knight in black armor may have given Scott a hint for 
his black knight at the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouche in 
''Ivanhoe" (1819). His final appearance is in the 
chamber of the king, with whom he holds quite a long 
conversation. "The worm is my sister," he says: 
"the mist of death is on me. My bed is in darkness. 
The prisoner is innocent. The prior of St. Mary's is 
gone to his account. Be warned." It is not explained 
why Mrs. Radcliffe refrained from publishing this last 
romance of hers. Perhaps she recognized that it was 
belated and that the time for that sort of thing had 
gone by. By 1802 Lewis' " Monk " was in print, as 
well as several translations from German romances; 
Scott's early ballads were out, and Coleridge's "An- 
cient Mariner." That very year saw the publication 
of the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." By 1826 
the Waverley novels had made all previous fiction of 
the Gothic type hopelessly obsolete. In 1834 two vol- 
umes of her poems were given to the world, including 
a verse romance in eight cantos, " St. Alban's Abbey," 
and the verses scattered through her novels. By this 
time Scott and Coleridge were dead; Byron, Shelley, 
and Keats had been dead for years, and Mrs. Radcliffe's 
poesies fell upon the unheeding ears of a new genera- 
tion. A sneer in "Waverley" (1814) at the "Mys- 
teries of Udolpho " had hurt her feelings; * but Scott 
made amends in the handsome things which he said 
of her in his " Lives of the Novelists." It is interest- 
ing to note that when the " Mysteries " was issued, 
the venerable Joseph Warton was so much entranced 
that he sat up the greater part of the night to finish it. 
*See Julia Kavanagh's " English Women of Letters." 



The Gothic T^vival. 263 

The warfare between realism and romance, which 
went on in the days of Cervantes, as it does in the days 
of Zola and Howells, had its skirmishes also in 
Mrs. Radcliffe's time. Jane Austen's ''Northanger 
Abbey," written in 1803 but published only in 1817, is 
gently satirical of Gothic fiction. The heroine is 
devoted to the ** Mysteries of Udolpho," which she 
discusses with her bosom friend. ** While I have 
* Udolpho ' to read, I feel as if nobody could make me 
miserable. O the dreadful black veil! My dear Isa- 
bella, I am sure there must be Laurentina's skeleton 
behind it." 

**When you have finished * Udolpho,* " replies Isa- 
bella, **we will read * The Italian' together; and I 
have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same 
kind for you. . . I will read you their names directly. 
Here they are in my pocket-book. ' Castle of Wolfen- 
bach,' 'Clermont,' 'Mysterious Warnings,' 'Necro- 
mancer of the Black Forest,' 'Midnight Bell,' 
' Orphan of the Rhine,' and 'Horrid Mysteries.' " 

When introduced to her friend's brother, Miss Mor- 
land asks him at once, "Have you ever read 'Udol- 
pho,' Mr. Thorpe?" But Mr. Thorpe, who is *not a 
literary man, but much given to dogs and horses, 
assures her that he never reads novels; they are " full 
of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably 
decent one come out since * Tom Jones,' except the 
'Monk.'" The scenery about Bath reminds Miss 
Morland of the south of France and " the country 
that Emily and her father traveled through in the 
'Mysteries of Udolpho.'" She is enchanted at the 
prospect of a drive to Blaize Castle, where she hopes 
to have " the happiness of being stopped in their way 



264 zA History of English 'Romanticism. 

along narrow, winding vaults by a low, grated door; 
or even of having their lamp — their only lamp — 
extinguished by a sudden gust of wind and of being 
left in total darkness." She visits her friends, the Til- 
neys, at their country seat, Northanger Abbey, in 
Gloucestershire; and, on the way thither, young Mr. 
Tilney teases her with a fancy sketch of the Gothic 
horrors which she will unearth there: the "sliding 
panels and tapestry"; the remote and gloomy guest- 
chamber, which will be assigned her, with its ponder- 
ous chest, and its portrait of a knight in armor: the 
secret door, with massy bars and padlocks, that she 
will discover behind the arras, leading to a ** small 
vaulted room," and eventually to a "subterraneous 
communication between your apartment and the chapel 
of St. Anthony scarcely two miles off." Arrived at 
the abbey, she is disappointed at the modern appear- 
ance of her room, but contrives to find a secret 
drawer in an ancient ebony cabinet, and in this a roll 
of yellow manuscript which, on being deciphered, 
proves to be a washing bill. She is convinced, not- 
withstanding, that a mysterious door at the end of 
a certain gallery conducts to a series of isolated 
chambers where General Tilney, who is supposed to be 
a widower, is keeping his unhappy wife immured and 
fed on bread and water. When she finally gains admis- 
sion to this Bluebeard's chamber and finds it nothing 
but a suite of modern rooms, " the visions of romance 
were over. . . Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's 
works, and charming even as were the works of all her 
imitators, it was not in them, perhaps, that human 
nature, at least in the midland counties of England, 
was to be looked for." 



CHAPTER VIII. 
IPercs auD tbe JSallaDs. 

The regeneration of English poetic style at the close 
of the last century came from an unexpected quarter. 
What scholars and professional men of letters had 
sought to do by their imitations of Spenser and Mil- 
ton, and their domestication of the Gothic and the 
Celtic muse, was much more effectually done by Percy 
and the ballad collectors. What they had sought to 
do was to recall British poetry to the walks of imagi- 
nation and to older and better models than Dryden and 
Pope. But they could not jump off their own shad- 
ows: the eighteenth century was too much for them. 
While they anxiously cultivated wildness and simplic- 
ity, their diction remained polished, literary, academic 
to a degree. It is not, indeed, until we reach the 
boundaries of a new century that we encounter a 
Gulf Stream of emotional, creative impulse strong 
enough and hot enough to thaw the classical icebergs 
till not a floating spiculum of them is left. 

Meanwhile, however, there occurred a revivifying 
contact with one department, at least, of early verse 
literature, which did much to clear the way for Scott 
and Coleridge and Keats. The decade from 1760 to 
1770 is important in the history of English romanti- 
cism, and its most important title is Thomas Percy's 
**Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of 

265 



266 c// History of English Romanticism. 

Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our 
Earlier Poets," published in three volumes in 1765. 
It made a less immediate and exciting impression upon 
contemporary Europe than MacPherson's ** Poems of 
Ossian," but it was more fruitful in enduring results. 
The Germans make a convenient classification of 
poetry into Kunstpoesie and Volkspoesie^ terms which 
may be imperfectly translated as literary poetry and 
popular poetry. The English Kunstpoesie of the 
Middle Ages lay buried under many superincumbent 
layers of literary fashion. Oblivion had overtaken 
Gower and Occleve, and Lydgate and Stephen Hawes, 
and Skelton, and Henryson and James I. of Scotland, and 
well-nigh Chaucer himself — all the mediaeval poetry of 
the schools, in short. But it was known to the curious 
that there was still extant a large body of popular 
poetry in the shape of narrative ballads, which had 
been handed down chiefly by oral transmission, and 
still lived in the memories and upon the lips of the 
common people. Many of these went back in their 
original shapes to the Middle Ages, or to an even 
remoter antiquity, and belonged to that great store of 
folk-lore which was the common inheritance of the 
Aryan race. Analogues and variants of favorite Eng- 
lish and Scottish ballads have been traced through 
almost all the tongues of modern Europe. Danish 
literature is especially rich in ballads and affords 
valuable illustrations of our native ministrelsy.* It 
was, perhaps, due in part to the Danish settlements in 
Northumbria and to the large Scandinavian admixture 
in the Northumbrian blood and dialect, that *'the 

*Svend Grundtvig's great collection, " Danmark's Gamle Folke- 
viser," was published in five volumes in 1853-90. 



T^ercy and the ballads. 267 

north countrie " became par excellence the ballad land: 
Lowland Scotland — particularly the Lothians — and the 
English bordering counties, Northumberland, West- 
moreland, and Cumberland; with Yorkshire and Not- 
tinghamshire, in which were Barndale and Sherwood 
Forests, Robin Hood's haunts. It is not possible to 
assign exact dates to these songs. They were seldom 
reduced to writing till many years after they were 
composed. In the Middle Ages they were sung to 
the harp by wandering minstrels. In later times they 
were chanted or recited by ballad-singers at fairs, 
markets, ale-houses, street-corners, sometimes to the 
accompaniment of a fiddle or crowd. They were 
learned by ancient dames, who repeated them in 
chimney corners to children and grandchildren. In 
this way some of them were preserved in an unwrit- 
ten state, even to the present day, in the tenacious 
memory of the people, always at bottom conservative 
and, under a hundred changes of fashion in the literary 
poetry which passes over their heads, clinging obsti- 
nately to old songs and beliefs learned in childhood, 
and handing them on to posterity. Walter Scott got 
much of the material for his ** Ministrelsy of the Bor- 
der" from the oral recitation of pipers, shepherds, and 
old women in Ettrick Forest. Professor Child's — the 
latest and fullest ballad collection — contains pieces 
never before given in print or manuscript, some of 
them obtained in America! * 

Leading this subterranean existence, and generally 
thought unworthy the notice of educated people, they 

* Francis James Child's " English and Scottish Popular Ballads," 
issued in ten parts in 1882-98 is one of the glories of American 
scholarship. 



268 zA History of English 'T^pmanticism. 

naturally underwent repeated changes; so that we 
have numerous versions of the same story, and inci- 
dents, descriptions, and entire stanzas are borrowed 
and lent freely among the different ballads. The cir- 
cumstance, e. g.y of the birk and the briar springing 
from the graves of true lovers and intertwisting their 
branches occurs in the ballads of *' Fair Margaret and 
Sweet William," **Lord Thomas and Fair Annet," 
*'Lord Lovel," ''Fair Janet," and many others. The 
knight who was carried to fairyland through an en- 
trance in a green hillside, and abode seven years with 
the queen of fairy, recurs in " Tam Lin," "Thomas 
Rymer,"* etc. Like all folk-songs, these ballads are 
anonymous and may be regarded not as the composi- 
tion of any one poet, but as the property, and in a 
sense the work, of the people as a whole. Coming 
out of an uncertain past, based on some dark legend 
of heart-break or blood-shed, they bear no author's 
name, but are ferce natu7'(2 and have the flavor of wild 
game. They were common stock, like the national 
speech; everyone could contribute toward them: gen- 
erations of nameless poets, minstrels, ballad-singers 
modernized their language to suit new times, al- 
tered their dialect to suit new places, accommodated 
their details to different audiences, English or Scotch, 
and in every way that they thought fit added, re- 
trenched, corrupted, improved, and passed them on. 

Folk-poetry is conventional; it seems to be the 
production of a guild, and to have certain well under- 
stood and commonly expected tricks of style and verse. 
Freshness and sincerity are almost always attributes 
of the poetry of heroic ages, but individuality belongs 

* Cf. The Tannhauser legend and the Venusberg. 



l^ercy and the ballads. 269 

to a high civilization and an advanced literary cul- 
ture. Whether the " Iliad " and the ''Odyssey" are 
the work of one poet or of a cycle of poets, doubtless 
the rhetorical peculiarities of the Homeric epics, such 
as the recurrent phrase and the conventional epithet 
(the rosy-fingered dawn, the well-greaved Greeks, the 
swift-footed Achilles, the much-enduring Odysseus, 
etc.) are due to this communal or associative charac- 
ter of ancient heroic song. As in the companies of 
architects who built the mediaeval cathedrals, or in 
the schools of early Italian painters, masters and dis- 
ciples, the manner of the individual artist was subdued 
to the tradition of his craft. 

The English and Scottish popular ballads are in 
various simple stanza forms, the commonest of all 
being the old septenarius or '* fourteener," arranged 
in a four-lined stanza of alternate eights and sixes, 
thus: 

" Up then crew the red, red cock, 

And up and crew the gray; 
The eldest to the youngest said 

' 'Tis time we were away.' " * 

This is the stanza usually employed by modern ballad 
imitators, like Coleridge in ''The Ancient Mariner," 
Scott in "Jock o' Hazeldean," Longfellow in "The 
Wreck of the Hesperus," Macaulay in the " Lays of 
Ancient Rome," Aytoun in the " Lays of the Scottish 
Cavaliers." Many of the stylistic and metrical peculiar- 
ities of the ballads arose from the fact that they were 
made to be sung or recited from memory. Such are 
perhaps the division of the longer ones into fits, to rest 
the voice of the singer; and the use of the burden or 
* '• The Wife of Usher's Well." 



270 cA History of English Romanticism, 

refrain for the same purpose, as also to give the listen- 
ers and bystanders a chance to take up the chorus, 
which they probably accompanied with a few dancing 
steps.* Sometimes the burden has no meaning in 
itself and serves only to mark time with a Ifey derry 
doivn or an O lilly lally and the like. Sometimes it has 
more or less reference to the story, as in " The Two 
Sisters": 

*' He has ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair — 
Binnorie, O Binnorie — 
And wi* them strung his harp sae rare — 
By the bonnie mill-dams of Binnorie." 

Again it has no discoverable relation to the context, as 
in *' Riddles Wisely Expounded " — 

*• There was a knicht riding frae the east — 
Jennifer gentle and rosemarie — 
Who had been wooing at monie a place — 
As the dew flies over the mulberry tree." 

Both kinds of refrain have been liberally employed by 
modern balladists. Thus Tennyson in *' The Sisters " : 

*• We were two sisters of one race, 

The wind is howling in turret and tree; 
She was the fairer in the face, 
O the earl was fair to see." 

While Rossetti and Jean Ingelow and others have 
rather favored the inconsequential burden, an affecta- 
tion travestied by the late Mr. C. S. Calverley : 

* It should never be forgotten that the ballad (derived from ballare 
— to dance) was originally not a written poem, but a song and dance. 
Many of the old tunes are preserved. A number are given in Chap- 
pell's " Popular Music of the Olden Time," and in the appendix to 
Mothervrell's " Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern " (1827). 



T^ercy and the ballads. 271 

*• The auld wife sat at her ivied door, 

(Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) 
A thing she had frequently done before; 

And her spectacles lay on her aproned knees. 

*• The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair 
(Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese). 
And I met with a ballad, I can't say where. 
Which wholly consisted of lines like these." * 

A musical or mnemonic device akin to ttie refrain was 
that sing-song species of repetend so familiar in bal- 
lad language: 

" She had na pu'd a double rose, 
A rose but only twa." 

'• They had na sailed a league, a league, 
A league but barely three." 

" How will I come up ? How can I come up ? 
How can I come to thee ? " 

An answer is usually returned in the identical words 
of the question; and as in Homer, a formula of narra- 
tion or a commonplace of description does duty again 
and again. Iteration in the ballads is not merely for 
economy, but stands in lieu of the metaphor and other 
figures of literary poetry: 

" ' O Marie, put on your robes o' black, 
Or else your robes o' brown, 
For ye maun gang wi' me the night, 
To see fair Edinbro town.' 

* I winna put on my robes o' black. 

Nor yet my robes o' brown; 
But I'll put on my robes o' white, 

To shine through Edinbro town.' " 

* " A Ballad." One theory explains these meaningless refrains as 
remembered fragments of older ballads. 



272 <iA History of English 'Romanticism, 

Another mark ofthegenuineballad manner, as of Homer 
and Volkspoesie in general, is the conventional epithet. 
Macaulay noted that the gold is always red in the bal- 
lads, the ladies always gay, and Robin Hood's men are 
always his merry men. Doughty Douglas, bold Robin 
Hood, merry Carlisle, the good greenwood, the gray 
goose wing, and the wan water are other inseparables 
of the kind. Still another mark is the frequent reten- 
tion of the Middle English accent on the final syllable 
in words like contrie, baron, dinere, felawe, abbay, 
rivere, money, and its assumption by words which 
never properly had it, such as lady, harper, wedding, 
water, etc.* Indeed, as Percy pointed out in his intro- 
duction, there were ''many phrases and idioms which 
the minstrels seem to have appropriated to them- 
selves, . . a cast of style and measure very different 
from that of contemporary poets of a higher class." 

Not everything that is called a ballad belongs to 
the class of poetry that we are here considering. In 
its looser employment the word has signified almost 
any kind of song: ''a woeful ballad made to his mis- 
tress' eyebrow," for example. "Ballade" was also 
the name of a somewhat intricate French stanza form, 
employed by Gower and Chaucer, and recently reintro- 
duced into English verse by Dobson, Lang, Gosse, and 
others, along with the virelay, rondeau, triolet, etc. 
There is also a numerous class of popular ballads — in 

* Reproduced by Rossetti and other moderns. See them parodied 
in Robert Buchanan's "Fleshly School of Poets " : 

" When seas do roar and skies do pour, 
Hard is the lot of the sailor 
Who scarcely, as he reels, can tell 
The sidelights from the binnacle." 



Tercy and the ballads. 273 

the sense of something made for the people, though 
not by the people — which are without relation to our 
subject. These are the street ballads, which were 
and still are hawked about by ballad-mongers, and 
which have no literary character whatever. There 
are satirical and political ballads, ballads versifying 
passages in Scripture or chronicle, ballads relating to 
current events, or giving the history of famous mur- 
ders and other crimes, of prodigies, providences, and 
all sorts of happenings that teach a lesson in morals: 
about George Barnwell and the ** Babes in the Wood," 
and **Whittington and his Cat," etc.: ballads like 
Shenstone's ** Jemmy Dawson" and Gay's ** Black- 
eyed Susan." Thousands of such are included in 
manuscript collections like the *' Pepysian," or printed 
in the publications of the Roxburghe Club and the 
Ballad Society. But whether entirely modern, or 
extant in black-letter broadsides, they are nothing to 
our purpose. We have to do here with the folk-song, 
the traditional ballad, product of the people at a time 
when the people was homogeneous and the separation 
between the lettered and unlettered classes had not 
yet taken place: the true minstrel ballad of the Middle 
Ages, or of that state of society which in rude and 
primitive neighborhoods, like the Scottish border, 
prolonged medieval conditions beyond the strictly 
mediaeval period. 

In the form in which they are preserved, few of our 
ballads are older than the seventeenth or the latter 
part of the sixteenth century, though in their origin 
many of them are much older. Manuscript versions 
of ''Robin Hood and the Monk" and ** Robin Hood 
and the Potter" exist, which are referred to the last 



274 e^ History of English Romanticism. 

years of the fifteenth century. The " Lytel Geste of 
Robyn Hode " was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 
1489. The '' Not-Brown Maid " was printed in 
** Arnold's Chronicle " in 1502. " The Hunting of the 
Cheviot" — the elder version of " Chevy Chase" — was 
mentioned by Philip Sidney in his ** Defence of Poe- 
sie" in 1580.* The ballad is a narrative song, naive, 
impersonal, spontaneous, objective. The singer is 
lost in the song, the teller in the tale. That is its 
essence, but sometimes the story is told by the lyrical, 
sometimes by the dramatic method. In " Helen of 
Kirkconnell " it is the bereaved lover who is himself 
the speaker: in ** Waly Waly," the forsaken maid. 
These are monologues; for a purely dialogue ballad it 
will be sufficient to mention the powerful and impress- 
ive piece in the '* Reliques " entitled *' Edward." Her- 
der translated this into German; it is very old, with 
Danish, Swedish, and Finnish analogues. It is a story 
of parricide, and is narrated in a series of questions 
by the mother and answers by the son. The com- 
monest form, however, was a mixture of epic and 
dramatic, or direct relation with dialogue. A frequent 
feature is the abruptness of the opening and the tran- 
sitions. The ballad-maker observes unconsciously 
Aristotle's rule for the epic poet, to begin in viedias 
res. Johnson noticed this in the instance of ** Johnny 
Armstrong," but a stronger example is found in *' The 
Banks of Yarrow:" 

* "I never heard the old song of Percie and Douglas that I found not 
my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by 
some blind crouder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which 
being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, 
what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar I " 



T^rcy and the 'Ballads. 275 

*' Late at e'en, drinking the wine, 
And ere they paid the lawing, 
They set a combat them between. 
To fight it in the dawing." 

With this, an indirect, allusive way of telling the story, 
which Goethe mentions in his prefatory note to " Des 
Sangers Fluch,"' as a constant note of the ** Volkslied." 
The old ballad-maker does not vouchsafe explanations 
about persons and motives; often he gives the history, 
not expressly nor fully, but by hints and glimpses, 
leaving the rest to conjecture; throwing up its salient 
points into a strong, lurid light against a background 
of shadows. The knight rides out a-hunting, and 
by and by his riderless horse comes home, and that 
is all : 

" Toom* hame cam the saddle 
But never cam he. " 

Or the knight himself comes home and lies down to 
die, reluctantly confessing, under his mother's ques- 
tioning, that he dined with his true-love and is 
poisoned, f And again that is all. Or 

" — In behint yon auld fail % dyke, 
I wot there lies a new-slain knight ; 
And naebody kens that he lies there, 
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair. 

" His hound is to the hunting gane, 
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame, 
His lady's ta'en another mate, 
So we may mak our dinner sweet." 

A whole unuttered tragedy of love, treachery, and 
murder lies back of these stanzas. This method of 

* Empty : " Bonnie George Campbell." f '* Lord Randall." 

X Turf ; " The Twa Corbies." 



276 qA History of English '^manticism, 

narration may be partly accounted for by the fact 
that the story treated was commonly some local 
country-side legend of family feud or unhappy 
passion, whose incidents were familiar to the ballad- 
singer's audience and were readily supplied by 
memory. One theory holds that the story was partly 
told and partly sung, and that the links and exposi- 
tions were given in prose. However this may be, the 
artless art of these popular poets evidently included 
^a knowledge of the uses of mystery and suggestion. 
They knew that, for the imagination, the part is some- 
times greater than the whole. Gray wrote to Mason in 
1757, **I have got the old Scotch ballad [Gil Maurice] 
on which * Douglas ' [Home's tragedy, first played at 
Edinburgh in 1756] was founded. It is divine. . . 
Aristotle's best rules are observed in it in a manner 
which shews the author never had heard of Aristotle. 
It begins in the fifth act of the play. You may read 
it two-thirds through without guessing what it is 
about; and yet, when you come to the end, it is im- 
possible not to understand the whole story." 

It is not possible to recover the conditions under 
which these folk-songs *'made themselves,"* as it 
were, or grew under the shaping hands of generations 
of nameless bards. Their naive, primitive quality 
cannot be acquired: the secret is lost. But Walter 

* I use this phrase without any polemic purpose. The question of 
origins is not here under discussion. Of course at some stage in the 
history of any ballad the poet, the individual artist, is present, 
though the precise ratio of his agency to the communal element in 
the work is obscure. For an acute and learned review of this topic, 
see the Introduction to " Old English Ballads," by Professor Francis 
B. Gummere (Athenssum Press Series), Boston, 1894. 



Tercy and the ballads. 277 

Scott, who was steeped to the lips in balladry, and 
whose temper had much of the healthy objectivity 
of an earlier age, has succeeded as well as any 
modern. Some of his ballads are more perfect 
artistically than his long metrical romances; those of 
them especially which are built up from a burden or 
fragment of old minstrel song, like ''Jock o' Hazel- 
dean " * and the song in " Rokeby ": 

" He turned his charger as he spake 
Upon the river shore, 
He gave the bridle-reins a shake, 
Said ' Adieu for evermore, 
My love ! 
And adieu for evermore.' " 

Here Scott catches the very air of popular poetry, 
and the dovetailing is done with most happy skill. 
" Proud Maisie is in the Wood " is a fine example of 
the ballad manner of story-telling by implication.! 

As regards their subject-matter, the ballads admit 
of a rough classification into the historical, or quasi- 
historical, and the purely legendary or romantic. 
Of the former class were the "riding-ballad" of the 
Scottish border, where the forays of moss-troopers, 

* From "Jock o' Hazel Green." " Young Lochinvar " is derived 
from " Katherine Janf arie " in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish 
Border." 

f '* Scott has given us nothing more complete and lovely than this 
little song, which unites simplicity and dramatic power to a wildwood 
music of the rarest quality. No moral is drawn, far less any con- 
scious analysis of feeling attempted : the pathetic meaning is left to 
be suggested by the mere presentiment of the situation. Inexperi- 
enced critics have often named this, which may be called the 
Homeric manner, superficial from its apparent simple facility." — 
Palgrave : " Golden TV^ai-Mrj/ " (Edition of 1866), p. 392. 



278 ^ History of English Romanticism. 

the lifting of blackmail, the raids and private warfare 
of the Lords of the Marches, supplied many traditions 
of heroism and adventure like those recorded in *' The 
Battle of Otterburn," **The Hunting of the Cheviot," 
'* Johnnie Armstrong," " Kinmont Willie," ** The 
Rising in the North " and " Northumberland Be- 
trayed by Douglas." Of the fictitious class, some 
were shortened, popularized, and generally degraded 
versions of the chivalry romances, which were passing 
out of favor among educated readers in the sixteenth 
century and fell into the hands of the ballad-makers. 
Such, to name only a few included in the *' Reliques," 
were **Sir Lancelot du Lake," *'The Legend of Sir 
Guy," '^ King Arthur's Death " and ** The Marriage of 
Sir Gawaine." But the substance of these was not of 
the genuine popular stuff, and their personages were 
simply the old heroes of court poetry in reduced cir- 
cumstances. Much more impressive are the original 
folk-songs, which strike their roots deep into the 
ancient world of legend and even of myth. 

In this true ballad world there is a strange com- 
mingling of paganism and Catholic Christianity. It 
abounds in the supernatural and the marvelous. 
Robin Hood is a pious outlaw. He robs the fat- 
headed monks, but w\\\ not die unhouseled and has 
great devotion to Our Blessed Lady; who appears 
also to Brown Robyn, when he is cast overboard, 
hears his confession and takes his soul to Heaven.* 
When mass has been sung and the bells of merry 
Lincoln have rung, Lady Maisry goes seeking her 
little Hugh, who has been killed by the Jew's daughter 

* " Brown Robyn's Confession." Robin Hood risks his life to take 
the sacrament. " Robin Hood and the Monk." 



T^ercy and the ballads. 279 

and thrown into Our Lady's draw-well fifty fathom 
deep, and the boy answers his mother miraculously 
from the well.* Birds carry messages for lovers f and 
dying men, J or show the place where the body lies 
buried and the corpse-candles shine.§ The harper 
strings his harp with three golden hairs of the 
drowned maiden, and the tune that he plays upon 
them reveals the secret of her death, j] The ghosts 
of the sons that have perished at sea come home to 
take farewell of their mother.^ The spirit of the for- 
saken maid visits her false lover at midnight;** or **the 
dead comes for the quick, "ff as in Burger's weird poem. 
There are witches, fairies, and mermaidens W in the 
ballads: omens, dreams, spells,§§ enchantments, trans- 
formations, |||| magic rings and charms, **gramarye "^T 
of many sorts; and all these things are more effective 
here than in poets like Spenser and Collins, be- 
cause they are matters of belief and not of make- 
believe. 

The ballads are prevailingly tragical in theme, and 
the tragic passions of pity and fear find an elementary 
force of utterance. Love is strong as death, jealousy 

* " Sir Hugh." Cf. Chaucer's " Prioresse Tale." 

f " The Gay Goshawk." 

I " Johnnie Cock." 

§ " Young Hunting." 

\ •• The Twa Sisters." 

•f[ " The Wife of Usher's Well." 

** " Fair Margaret and wSweet William." 

ft " Sweet William's Ghost." 

ii" Clerk Colven." 

§§" Willie's Lady." 

\\ " Kemp Owyne " and " Tarn Lin." 

ITU " King Estmere." 



28o ^ History of English %omanticism. 

cruel as the grave. Hate, shame, grief, despair speak 
here with their native accent: 

** There are seven forsters at Pickeram Side, 
At Pickeram where they dwell, 
And for a drop of thy heart's bluid 
They wad ride the fords of hell." * 

" O little did my mother think, 
The day she cradled me, 
What lands I was to travel through, 
What death I was to dee." f 

The maiden asks her buried lover: 

" Is there any room at your head, Sanders? 
Is there any room at your feet? 
Or any room at your twa sides, 

Where fain, fain would I sleep? " | 

** O waly, waly, but love be bonny 
A little time while it is new; § 
But when 'tis auld it waxeth cauld 

And fades awa' like morning dew. , . 

** And O! if my young babe were born, 

And set upon the nurse's knee. 

And I mysel' were dead and gane. 

And the green grass growing over me ! " 

Manners in this world are of a primitive savagery. 
There are treachery, violence, cruelty, revenge; but 
there are also honor, courage, fidelity, and devotion 

*" Johnnie Cock." 

f " Mary Hamilton." 

X " Sweet William's Ghost." 

§"The Forsaken Bride." C/. Chaucer: 

" Love is noght old as whan that it is newe." 

— Gierke s Tale. 



T^ercy and the ballads. 281 

that endureth to the end. ''Child Waters" and 
''Fair Annie" do not suffer on a comparison with 
Tennyson's "Enid" and Chaucer's story of patient 
Griselda (" The Clerkes Tale ") with which they have 
a common theme. It is the mediaeval world. Ma- 
rauders, pilgrims, and wandering gleemen go about in 
it. The knight stands at his garden pale, the lady 
sits at her bower window, and the little foot page car- 
ries messages over moss and moor. Marchmen are 
riding through the Bateable Land "by the hie light o' 
the moon." Monks are chanting in St. Mary's Kirk, 
trumpets are blowing in Carlisle town, castles are 
burning; down in the glen there is an ambush and 
swords are flashing; bows are twanging in the green- 
wood; four and twenty ladies are playing at the ball, 
and four and twenty milk-white calves are in the 
woods of Glentanner — all ready to be stolen. About 
Yule the round tables begin; the queen looks over the 
castle-wall, the palmer returns from the Holy Land, 
Young Waters lies deep in Stirling dungeon, but Child 
Maurice is in the silver wood, combing his yellow 
locks with a silver comb. 

There is an almost epic coherence about the ballads 
of the Robin Hood cycle. This good robber, who 
with his merry men haunted the forests of Sherwood 
and Barnsdale, was the real ballad hero and the dar- 
ling of the popular fancy which created him. For 
though the names of his confessor, Friar Tuck; his 
mistress, Maid Marian; and his companions. Little 
John, Scathelock, and Much the miller's son, have an 
air of reality, — and though the tradition has associated 
itself with definite localities, — there is nothing histori- 
cal about Robin Hood. Lano-Jand, in the fourteenth 



282 ^ History of English Romanticism. 

century, mentions ** rhymes of Robin Hood"; and 
efforts have been made to identify him with one of 
the dispossessed followers of Simon de Montfort, in 
**the Barons' War," or with some still earlier free- 
booter, of Hereward's time, who had taken to the 
woods and lived by plundering the Normans. Myth 
as he is, he is a thoroughly national conception. He 
had the English love of fair play; the English readi- 
ness to shake hands and make up when worsted in a 
square fight. He killed the King's venison, but was a 
loyal subject. He took from the rich and gave to the 
poor, executing thus a kind of v/ild justice. He defied 
legal authority in the person of the proud sheriff of 
Nottingham, thereby appealing to that secret sym- 
pathy with lawlessness which marks a vigorous, free 
yeomanry.* He had the knightly virtues of courtesy 
and hospitality, and the yeomanly virtues of good 
temper and friendliness. And finally, he was a mighty 
archer with the national weapons, the long-bow and 
the cloth-yard shaft; and so appealed to the national 
love of sport in his free and careless life under the 
greenwood tree. The forest scenery gives a poetic 
background to his exploits, and though the ballads, 
like folk-poetry in general, seldom linger over natural 
description, there is everywhere a consciousness of 
this background and a wholesome, outdoor feeling: 

*' In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, 
And leves be large and long, 
Hit is full mery in feyre forestc 
To here the foulys song: 

* What character so popular as a wild prince — like Prince Hal — 
who breaks his own laws, and the heads of his own people, in a demo- 
cratic way? 



T^ercy and the 'Ballads. 283 

** To se the dere draw to the dale, 
And leve the hillis hee, 
And shadow hem in the leves grene, 
Under the grene- wode tre." * 

Although a few favorite ballads such as ** Johnnie 
Armstrong," "Chevy Chase," **The Children in the 
Wood," and some of the Robin Hood ones had long 
been widely, nay almost universally familiar, they had 
hardly been regarded as literature worthy of serious 
attention. They were looked upon as nursery tales, 
or at best as the amusement of peasants and unlettered 
folk, who used to paste them up on the walls of inns, 
cottages, and ale-houses. Here and there an educated 
man had had a sneaking fondness for collecting old 
ballads — much as people nowadays collect postage 
stamps. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, made such a collec- 
tion, and so did Edward Selden, the great legal antiquary 
and scholar of Milton's time. **I have heard," wrote 
Addison, ** that the late Lord Dorset, who had the 
greatest wit tempered with the greatest candor, and 
was one of the finest critics as well as the best poets 
of his age, had a numerous collection of old English 
ballads, and a particular pleasure in the reading of 
them. I can affirm the same of Mr. Dryden." 
Dryden's "Miscellany Poems" (i684)^gave "Gilde- 
roy," " Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy Chase," "The 
Miller and the King's Daughter," and "Little Mus- 
grave and the Lady Barnard." The last named, as 
well as "Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament" and "Fair 
Margaret and Sweet William," f was quoted in Beau- 

* " Robin Hood and the Monk." 

I For a complete exposure of David Mallet's impudent claim to 
the authorship of this ballad, see Appendix II. to Professor Phelps' 

** English Romantic Movement." 



284 <^ History of English Romanticism. 

mont and Fletcher's *' Knight of the Burning Pestle," 
(16 11). Scraps of them are sung by one of the dramatis 
personce^ old Merrythought, whose specialty is a 
damnable iteration of ballad fragments. References 
to old ballads are numerous in the Elizabethan plays. 
Percy devoted the second book of his first series to 
*' Ballads that Illustrate Shakspere." In the seven- 
teenth century a few ballads were printed entire in 
poetic miscellanies entitled ''Garlands," higgledy- 
piggledy with pieces of all kinds. Professor Child 
enumerates nine ballad collections before Percy's. 
The only ones of any importance among these were 
"A Collection of Old Ballads " (Vols. I. and II. in 1723, 
Vol. III. in 1725), ascribed to Ambrose Philips; and the 
Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay's, " Tea Table Miscellany," 
(in 4 vols., 1714-40) and " Evergreen " (2 vols., 1724). 
The first of these collections was illustrated with 
copperplate engravings and supplied with introduc- 
tions which were humorous in intention. The editor 
treated his ballads as trifles, though he described them 
as "corrected from the best and most ancient copies 
extant"; and said that Homer himself was nothing 
more than a blind ballad-singer, whose songs had 
been subsequently joined together and formed into 
an epic poen# Ramsay's ballads were taken in part 
from a manuscript collection of some eight hundred 
pages, made by George Bannatyne about 1570 and still 
preserved in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. 

In Nos. 70, 74, and 85, of the Spectator, Addison had 
praised the naturalness and simplicity of the popu- 
lar ballads, selecting for special mention "Chevy 
Chase " — the later version — " which," he wrote, "is the 
favorite ballad of the common people of England; and 



T^ercy and the ballads. 285 

Ben Jonson used to say he had rather have been the 
author of it than of all his works"; and "the 'Two 
Children in the Wood,' which is one of the darling 
songs of the common people, and has been the delight 
of most Englishmen in some part of their age." 
Addison justifies his liking for these humble poems 
by classical precedents. " The greatest modern critics 
have laid it down as a rule that an heroic poem should 
be founded upon some important precept of morality 
adapted to the constitution of the country in which 
the poet writes. Homer and Virgil have formed their 
plans in this view." Accordingly he thinks that the 
author of ''Chevy Chase" meant to point a moral as 
to the mischiefs of private war. As if it were not 
precisely the gauditmi certajjiinis that inspired the old 
border ballad-maker! As if he did not glory in the 
fight ! The passage where Earl Percy took the dead 
Douglas by the hand and lamented his fallen foe 
reminds Addison of ^Eneas' behavior toward Lausus. 
The robin red-breast covering the children with leaves 
recalls to his mind a similar touch in one of Horace's 
odes. But it was much that Addison, whose own 
verse was so artificial, should have had a taste for the 
wild graces of folk-song. He was severely ridiculed 
by his contemporaries for these concessions. "He 
descended now and then to lower disquisitions," wrote 
Dr. Johnson, "and by a serious display of the beauties 
of ' Chevy Chase,' exposed himself to the ridicule of 
Wagstaff, who bestowed a like pompous character on 
'Tom Thumb'; and to the contempt of Dennis, 
who, considering the fundamental position of his 
criticism, that 'Chevy Chase' pleases and ought to 
please because it is natural, observes that 'there is a 



286 zA History of English ^Romanticism. 

way of deviating from nature ... by imbecility, 
which degrades nature by faintness and diminu- 
tion* ... In 'Chevy Chase' . . . there is a chill 
and lifeless imbecility. The story cannot possibly be 
told in a manner that shall make less impression on 
the mind."* 

Nicholas Rowe, the dramatist and Shakspere editor, 
had said a good word for ballads in the prologue to 
** Jane Shore" (17 13): 

** Let no nice taste despise the hapless dame 
Because recording ballads chant her name. 
Those venerable ancient song enditers 
Soared many a pitch above our modern writers. . , 
Our numbers may be more refined than those, 
But what we've gained in verse, we've lost in prose. 
Their words no shuffling double meaning knew : 
Their speech was homely, but their hearts were true. . . 
With rough, majestic force they moved the heart, 
And strength and nature made amends for art." 

Ballad forgery had begun early. To say nothing of 
appropriations, like Mallet's, of *' William and Mar- 
garet," Lady Wardlaw put forth her "Hardyknut" 
in 17 19 as a genuine old ballad, and it was reprinted 
as such in Ramsay's *' Evergreen." Gray wrote to 
Walpole in 1760, *'I have been often told that the 
poem called * Hardicanute ' (which I always admired 
and still admire) was the work of somebody that lived 
a few years ago. This I do not at all believe, though 
it has evidently been retouched by some modern 
hand." Before Percy no concerted or intelligent 
/ effort had been made toward collecting, preserving, 
and editing the corpus poetarum of English minstrelsy. 

* " Life of Addison." 



T^ercy and the ballads. 287 

The great mass of ancient ballads, so far as they were 
in print at all, existed in *' stall copies," /. <f., single 
sheets or broadsides, struck off for sale by ballad- 
mongers and the keepers of book-stalls. 

Thomas Percy, the compiler of the *' Reliques," was 
a parish clergyman, settled at the retired hamlet of 
Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire. For years he had 
amused his leisure by collecting ballads. He num- 
bered among his acquaintances men of letters like 
Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, Grainger, Farmer, and 
Shenstone. It was the last who suggested the plan of 
the ''Reliques" and who was to have helped in its 
execution, had not his illness and death prevented. 
Johnson spent a part of the summer of 1764 on a visit 
to the vicarage of Easton Maudit, on which occasion 
Percy reports that his guest ''chose for his regular 
reading the old Spanish romance of ' Felixmarte of 
Hircania,' in folio, which he read quite through." He 
adds, what one would not readily suspect, that the 
doctor, when a boy, " was immoderately fond of read- 
ing romances of chivalry, and he retained his fondness 
for them through life. , . I have heard him attribute 
to these extravagant fictions that unsettled turn of 
mind which prevented his ever fixing in any profes- 
sion." Percy talked over his project with Johnson, 
who would seem to have given his approval, and even 
to have added his persuasions to Shenstone's. For in 
the preface to the first edition of the " Reliques," the 
editor declared that " he could refuse nothing to such 
judges as the author of the Rambler and the late 
Mr. Shenstone"; and that "to the friendship of Mr. 
Johnson he owes many valuable hints for the conduct 
of his work." And after Ritson had questioned the 



288 zA History of English '^manticism. 

existence of the famous "folio manuscript," Percy's 
nephew in the advertisement to the fourth edition 
(1794), cited "the appeal publicly made to Dr. John- 
son ... so long since as in the year 1765, and never 
once contradicted by him." 

In spite of these amenities, the doctor had a low- 
opinion of ballads and ballad collectors. In the 
Gambler (No. 177) he made merry over one Can- 
tilenus, who " turned all his thoughts upon old bal- 
lads, for he considered them as the genuine records of 
the natural taste. He offered to show me a copy of 
'The Children in the Wood,' which he firmly believed 
to be of the first edition, and by the help of which the 
text might be freed from several corruptions, if this 
age of barbarity had any claim to such favors from 
him." "The conversation," says Boswell, "having 
turned on modern imitations of ancient ballads, and 
someone having praised their simplicity, he treated 
them with that ridicule which he always displayed 
when that subject was mentioned." Johnson wrote 
several stanzas in parody of the ballads; e. g.^ 

*' The tender infant, meek and mild, 
Fell down upon a stone: 
The nurse took up the squealing child, 
But still the child squealed on." 

And again: 

** I put my hat upon my head 
And walked into the Strand; 
And there I met another man 
Whose hat was in his hand. " 

This is quoted by Wordsworth,* who compares it with 
a stanza from " The Children in the Wood ": 

* Preface to second edition of the " Lyrical Ballads." 



Tercy and the ballads. 289 

" Those pretty babes, with hand in hand, 
Went wandering up and down; 
But never more they saw the man 
Approaching from the town." 

He says that in both of these stanzas the lan- 
guage is that of familiar conversation, yet one stanza 
is admirable and the other contemptible, because the 
matter of it is contemptible. In the essay supple- 
mentary to his preface, Wordsworth asserts that the 
"Reliques " was *' ill suited to the then existing taste 
of city society, and Dr. Johnson . . . was not sparing 
in his exertions to make it an object of contempt"; 
and that '* Dr. Percy was so abashed by the ridicule 
flung upon his labors . . . that, though while he was 
writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to 
follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity 
and genuine pathos (as is evinced by the exquisite 
ballad of * Sir Cauline ' and by many other pieces), 
yet when he appeared in his own person and character 
as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of * The 
Hermit of Warkworth,' a diction scarcely distin- 
guishable from the vague, the glossy and unfeeling 
language of his day." Wordsworth adds that he 
esteems the genius of Dr. Percy in this kind of writing 
superior to that of any other modern writer; and that 
even Burger had not Percy's fine sensibility. He 
quotes, in support of this opinion, two stanzas from 
''The Child of Elle " in the 'Tveliques," and con- 
trasts them with the diluted and tricked-out version 
of the same in Burger's German. 

Mr. Hales does not agree in this high estimate of 
Percy as a ballad composer. Of this same *' Child of 
Elle" he says: *'The present fragment of a version 



290 t// History of English Romanticism. 

may be fairly said to be now printed for the first time, 
as in the * Reliques ' it is buried in a heap of ' polished ' 
verses composed by Percy. That worthy prelate, 
touched by the beauty of it — he had a soul — was un- 
happily moved to try his hand at its completion. A 
wax-doll-maker might as well try to restore Milo's 
Venus. There are thirty-nine lines here. There are 
two hundred in the thing called the ^ Child of EUe ' 
in the 'Reliques.' But in those two hundred lines 
all the thirty-nine originals do not appear. . . On the 
whole, the union of the genuine and the false — of the 
old ballad with Percy's tawdry feebleness — makes 
about as objectionable a misalliance 2l2> that in the story 
itself is in the eyes of the father."* The modern 
ballad scholars, in their zeal for the purity of the text, 
are almost as hard upon Percy as Ritson himself was. 
They say that he polished **The Heir of Linne " till 
he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 
126 lines to 216 — *'a fine flood of ballad and water." f 
The result of this piecing and tinkering in *' Sir Cau- 
line " — which Wordsworth thought exquisite — they re- 
gard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that 
'' these additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive 
acquaintance with old balladry and a considerable 
talent of imitation." 

From the critical or scholarly point of view, these 
strictures are doubtless deserved. It is an editor's 
duty to give his text as he finds it, without interpola- 
tions or restorations; and it is unquestionable that 

*" Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript" (1867), Vol.11. Intro- 
ductory Essay by J. W. Hales on " The Revival of Ballad Poetry in 
the Eighteenth Century." 

t Ibid. 



T^ercy and the ballads, 291 

Percy's additions to fragmentary pieces are full of 
sentimentalism, affectation, and the spurious poetic 
diction of his age. An experienced ballad amateur 
can readily separate, in most cases, the genuine por- 
tions from the insertions. But it is unfair to try 
Percy by modern editorial canons. That sacredness 
which is now imputed to the ipsissima verba of an 
ancient piece of popular literature would have been 
unintelligible to men of that generation, who regarded 
such things as trifles at best, and mostly as barbarous 
trifles — something like wampum belts, or nose-rings, 
or antique ornaments in the gout barbare et charmant 
des bijoux goths, Percy's readers did not want torsos 
and scraps; to present them with acephalous or bob- 
tailed ballads — with cetera desunt and constellations of 
asterisks — like the manuscript in Prior's poem, the 
conclusion of which was eaten by the rats — would 
have been mere pedantry. Percy knew his public, 
and he knew how to make his work attractive to it. 
The readers of that generation enjoyed their ballad 
v.'ith a large infusion of Percy. If the scholars of this 
generation prefer to take theirs without, they know 
where to get it. 

The materials for the *' Reliques " were drawn partly 
from the Pepys collection at Magdalen College, 
Cambridge; from Anthony Wood's, made in 1676, in 
the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; from manuscript 
and printed ballads in the Bodleian, the British 
Museum, the archives of the Antiquarian Society, 
and private collections. Sir David Dalrymple sent 
a number of Scotch ballads, and the editor 
acknowledged obligations to Thomas Warton and 
many others. But the nucleus of the whole was a 



292 <iA History of English Romanticism. 

certain folio manuscript in a handwriting of Charles 
I.'s time, containing 191 songs and ballads, which 
Percy had begged, when still very young, from his 
friend Humphrey Pitt, of Prior's-Lee in Shropshire. 
When he first saw this precious document, it was torn, 
unbound, and mutilated, ** lying dirty on the floor 
under a bureau in the parlor, being used by the maids 
to light the fire." The first and last leaves were 
wanting, and ''of 54 pages near the beginning, half 
of every leaf hath been torn away."* Percy had it 
bound, but the binders trimmed off the top and bottom 
lines in the process. From this manuscript he pro- 
fessed to have taken '' the greater part " of the pieces 
in the ''Reliques." In truth he took only 45 of the 
176 poems in his first edition from this source. 

Percy made no secret of the fact that he filled 
lacunce in his originals with stanzas, and, in some 
cases, with nearly entire poems of his own composi- 
tion. But the extent of the liberties that he took 
with the text, although suspected, was not certainly 
known until Mr. Furnivall finally got leave to have 
the foho manuscript copied and printed, f Before this 
time it had been jealously guarded by the Percy family, 
and access to it had been denied to scholars. '' Since. 
Percy and his nephew printed their fourth edition of 
the * Reliques ' from the manuscript in 1794," writes 
Mr. Furnivall in his " Forewords," *' no one has 
printed any piece from it except Robert Jamieson — to 
whom Percy supplied a copy of * Child Maurice ' and 
* Robin Hood and the Old Man ' for his ' Popular 
Ballads and Songs ' (1806) — and Sir Frederic Madden, 

* *' Advertisement to the Fourth Edition." 
fin four volumes, 1867-68. 



T^ercy and the ballads. 293 

who was allowed — by one of Percy's daughters — to print 
* The Grene Knight,' 'The Carle of Carlisle ' and 
< The Turk and Gawin ' in his ' Syr Gawaine * for 
the Bannatyne Club, 1839." Percy was furiously 
assailed by Joseph Ritson for manipulating his texts; 
and in the 1794 edition he made some concessions to 
the latter's demand for a literal rescript, by taking off 
a few of the ornaments in which he had tricked them. 
Ritson was a thoroughly critical, conscientious student 
of poetic antiquities and held the right theory of an 
editor's functions. In his own collections of early 
English poetry he rendered a valuable service to all 
later inquirers. These included "Pieces of Ancient 
Popular Poetry," 1791; "Ancient Songs," 1792; 
" Scottish Songs," 1794; '* Robin Hood," 1795; besides 
editions of Laurence Minot's poems, and of " Gammer 
Gurton's Needle," as well as other titles. He was an 
ill-tempered and eccentric man: a vegetarian, a free- 
thinker, a spelling reformer, ^ and latterly a Jacobin. 
He attacked Warton as well as Percy, and used to 
describe any clerical antagonist as a " stinking priest." 
He died insane in 1803. Ritson took issue with the 
theory maintained in Percy's introductory " Essay on 
the Ancient Minstrels," viz. : that the minstrels were 
not only the singers, but likewise the authors of the 
ballads. This is a question chiefly interesting to an- 
tiquaries. But Ritson went so far in his rage against 
Percy as to deny the existence of the sacred Folio 
Manuscript, until convinced by abundant testimony 

* Spelling reform has been a favorite field for cranks to disport 
themselves upon. Ritson's particular vanity was the past participle 
of verbs ending in e\ e. g., perceiveed. Cf. Lander's notions of a 
similar kind. 



294 e^ History of English T^pmanticism. 

that there was such a thing. It was an age of forgeries, 
and Ritson was not altogether without justification in 
supposing that the author of ''The Hermit of Wark- 
worth " belonged in the same category with Chatterton, 
Ireland, and MacPherson. 

Percy, like Warton, took an apologetic tone toward 
his public. *' In a polished age, like the present," he 
wrote, ** I am sensible that many of these reliques of 
antiquity will require great allowances to be made for 
them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing 
simplicity and many artless graces, which, in the 
opinion of no mean critics, have been thought to com- 
pensate for the want of higher beauties." Indeed how 
should it have been otherwise? The old ballads were 
everything which the eighteenth century was not. 
They were rough and wild, where that was smooth and 
tame ; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary 
passions of human nature. They did not moralize, or 
philosophize, or sentimentalize; were never subtle, 
intellectual, or abstract. They used plain English, 
without finery or elegance. They had certain popular 
mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of 
speech or rhetorical artifices like personification, per- 
iphrasis, antithesis, and climax, so dear to the Augustan 
heart. They were intent on the story — not on the 
style — and they just told it and let it go for what it 
was worth. 

Moreover, there are ballads and ballads. The best 
of them are noble in expression as well as feeling, 
unequaled by anything in our mediaeval poetry out- 
side of Chaucer; unequaled by Chaucer himself in 
point of intensity, in occasional phrases of a piercing 
beauty: 



T^ercy and the ballads, 295 

* • The swans- fethars that his arrowe bar 
With his hart-blood they were wet." * 

" O cocks are crowing a merry mid-larf, 
A wat the wild fule boded day ; 
The salms of Heaven will be sung, 
And ere now I'll be missed away."f 

** If my love were an earthly knight, 
As he's an elfin gray, 
A wad na gie my ain true love 
For no lord that ye hae." % 

" She hang ae napkin at the door, 
Another in the ha, 
And a' to wipe the trickling tears, 
Sae fast as they did fa." § 

** And all is with one chyld of yours, 
I feel stir at my side: 
My gowne of green, it is too strait: 
Before it was too wide." j| 

Verse of this quality needs no apology. But of many 
of the ballads, Dennis' taunt, repeated by Dr. John- 
son, is true; they are not merely rude, but weak and 
creeping in style. Percy knew that the best of them 
would savor better to the palates of his contempo- 
raries if he dressed them with modern sauces. Yet he 
must have loved them, himself, in their native simplic- 
ity, and it seems almost incredible that he could have 
spoken as he did about Prior's insipid paraphrase of 
the '' Nut Brown Maid." '* If it had no other merit," 
he says of that most lovely ballad, ''than the having 
afforded the ground-work to Prior's * Henry and 

* " The Hunting of the Cheviot." % "Tarn Lin." 

\ " Sweet William's Ghost." § " Fair Annie." 

11 " Child Waters." 



296 <iA History of English %omanficism. 

Emma,' this ought to preserve it from oblivion." 
Prior was a charming writer of epigram, society verse, 
and the humorous confe in the manner of La Fontaine; 
but to see how incapable he was of the depth and sweet- 
ness of romantic poetry, compare a few lines of the 
original with the *' hubbub of words" in his modern- 
ized version, in heroic couplets: 

" O Lord, what is this worldes blisse 
That changeth as the mone ! 
The somer's day in lusty May 
Is derked before the none. 
I hear you say farewel. Nay, nay, 
We departe not so soon: 
Why say ye so ? Wheder wyle ye goo ? 
Alas! what have ye done? 
Alle my welfare to sorrow and care 
Shulde change if ye were gon; 
For in my minde, of all mankynde, 
I love but you alone." 

Now hear Prior, with his Venus and flames and god of 
love: 

*' What is our bliss that changeth with the moon, 
And day of life that darkens ere 'tis noon ? 
What is true passion, if unblest it dies ? 
And where is Emma's joy, if Henry flies ? 
If love, alas! be pain, the pain I bear 
No thought can figure and no tongue declare. 
Ne'er faithful woman felt, nor false one feigned 
The flames which long have in my bosom reigned. 
The god of love himself inhabits there 
With all his rage and dread and grief and care, 
His complement of stores and total war. 
O cease then coldly to suspect my love. 
And let my deed at least my faith approve. 
Alas! no youth shall my endearments share: 
Nor day nor night shall interrupt my care; 



T^ercy and the ballads. 297 

No future story shall with truth upbraid 
The cold indifference of the nut-brown maid; 
Nor to hard banishment shall Henry run 
While careless Emma sleeps on beds of down. 
View me resolved, where'er thou lead'st, to go: 
Friend to thy pain and partner of thy woe; 
For I attest fair Venus and her son 
That I, of all mankind, will love but thee alone." 

There could be no more striking object lesson than 
this of the plethora from which English poetic diction 
was suffering, and of the sanative value of a book like 
the ** Reliques." 

''To atone for the rudeness of the more obsolete 
poems," and ** to take off from the tediousness of the 
longer narratives," Percy interspersed a few modern 
ballads and a large number of *Mittle elegant pieces 
of the lyric kind " by Skelton, Hawes, Gascoigne, 
Raleigh, Marlowe, Shakspere, Jonson, Warner, Carew, 
Daniel, Lovelace, Suckling, Drayton, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, Wotton, and other well-known poets. Of 
the modern ballads the only one with any resemblance 
to folk-poetry was ''The Braes o' Yarrow " by William 
Hamilton of Bangour, a Scotch gentleman who was 
' ' out in the forty-five. " The famous border stream had 
watered an ancient land of song and story, and Hamil- 
ton's ballad, with its "strange, fugitive melody," 
was not unworthy of its traditions. Hamilton belongs 
to the Milton imitators by virtue of his octosyllabics, 
" Contemplation."* His "Braes o' Yarrow " hadbeen 
given already in Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany.'* 
The opening lines — 

" Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride, 
Busk ye, busk ye, my winsome marrow " — 

* See Phelps' " English Romantic Movement," pp. 33-35. 



298 zA History of English 'T{omanticism. 

are quoted in Wordsworth's " Yarrow Unvisited," as 
well as a line of the following stanza: 

" Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass, 
Yellow on Yarrow's bank the gowan: 
Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, 
Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowin'." 

The first edition of the ''Reliques" included one 
acknowledged child of Percy's muse, *'The Friar of 
Orders Grey," a short, narrative ballad made up of 
song snatches from Shakspere's plays. Later editions 
afforded his longer poem, " The Hermit of Wark- 
.worth," first published independently in 1771. 

With all its imperfections — perhaps partly in con- 
sequence of its imperfections — the *' Reliques " was an 
(^ epoch-making book. The nature of its service to 
English letters is thus stated by Macaulay, in the 
introduction to his ** Lays of Ancient Rome*": "We 
cannot wonder that the ballads of Rome should have 
altogether disappeared, when we remember how very 
narrowly, in spite of the invention of printing, those 
of our own country and those of Spain escaped the 
same fate. There is, indeed, little doubt that oblivion 
covers many English songs equal to any that were pub- 
lished by Bishop Percy; and many Spanish songs as 
good as the best of those which have been so happily 
translated by Mr. Lockhart. Eighty years ago Eng- 
land possessed only one tattered copy of * Child 
Waters' and * Sir Cauline,' and Spain only one tat- 
tered copy of the noble poem of the * Cid.' The snuff 
of a candle, or a mischievous dog, might in a moment 
have deprived the world forever of any of those fine 
compositions. Sir Walter Scott, who united to the fire 
of a great poet the minute curiosity and patient dili- 



Tercy and the ballads. 299 

gence of a great antiquary, was but just in time to save 
the precious reliques of the Minstrelsy of the Border." 
But Percy not only rescued, himself, a number of 
ballads from forgetfulness; what was equally impor- 
tant, his book prompted others to hunt out and pub- 
lish similar relics before it was too late. It was the 
occasion of collections like Herd's (1769), Scott's 
(1802-03), and Motherwell's (1827), and many more, 
resting on purer texts and edited on more scrupulous 
principles than his own. Furthermore, his ballads 
helped to bring about a reform in literary taste and to 
'inspire men of original genius. Wordsworth, Cole- 
ridge, Southey, Scott, all acknowledged the greatest 
obligations to them. Wordsworth said that English 
poetry had been '* absolutely redeemed" by them. 
'' I do not think there is a writer in verse of the pres- 
ent day who would not be proud to acknowledge his 
obligations to the 'Reliques.' I know that it is so with 
my friends ; and, for myself, I am happy in this occasion 
to make a public avowal of my own."* Without the 
'' Reliques," *' The Ancient Mariner," '' The Lady of 
the Lake," ''La Belle Dame sans Merci," " Stratton 
Water," and " The Haystack in the Floods" might 
never have been. Perhaps even the "Lyrical Bal- 
Jads " might never have been, or might have been some- 
thing quite unlike what they are. Wordsworth, to be 
sure, scarcely ranks among romantics, and he ex- 
pressly renounces the romantic machinery: 

" The dragon's wing, 
The magic ring, 
I shall not covet for my dower." f 

* Appendix to the Preface to the 2d edition of " Lyrical Ballads." 
f "Peter Bell." 



300 c/^ History of English l^manticisra. 

What he learned from the popular ballad was the power 
of sincerity and of direct and homely speech. 

As for Scott, he has recorded in an oft-quoted 
passage the impression that Percy's volumes made 
upon him in his school-days: **I remember well 
the spot where I read these volumes for the first 
time. It was beneath a huge plantain tree in the 
ruins of what had been intended for an old-fashioned 
arbor in the garden I have mentioned. The summer 
day sped onward so fast that, notwithstanding the 
sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of 
dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still 
found entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read 
and to remember was, in this instance, the same 
thing; and henceforth I overwhelmed my school-fel- 
lows, and all who would hearken to me, with tragical 
recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The 
first time, too, I could scrape a few shillings together, 
I bought unto myself a copy of these beloved volumes; 
nor do I believe I ever read a book so frequently, or 
with half the enthusiasm." 

The *'Reliques" worked powerfully in Germany,*, 
too. It was received in Lessing's circle with universal 
enthusiasm,* and fell in with that newly aroused in- 
terest in *' Volkslieder " which prompted Herder's 
** Stimmen der Volker " (1778-79). f Gottfried August 

*Scherer: " Geschiclite der Deutschen Literatur," p. 445. 

f In his third book Herder gave translations of over twenty pieces 
in the " Reliques," besides a number from Ramsay's and other collec- 
tions. His selections from Percy included "Chevy Chase," " Ed- 
ward," "The Boy and the Mantle," "King Estmere," " Waly, 
Waly," " Sir Patrick Spens," " Young Waters," " The Bonny Earl of 
Murray," " Fair Margaret and Sweet William," " Sweet William's 
Ghost," " The Nut-Brown Maid," " The Jew's Daughter, "etc., etc.; 



Tercy and the 'Ballads. 301 

Burger, in particular, was a poet who may be said to 
have been made by the English ballad literature, of 
which he was an ardent student. His poems were 
published in 1778, and included five translations from 
Percy: "The Child of Elle" (''Die Entfuhrung"), 
"The Friar of Orders Grey" (" Graurock "), "The 
Wanton Wife of Bath" (" Frau Schnips "), "King 
John and the Abbot of Canterbury " (" Der Kaiser 
und der Abt "), and " Child Waters " (" Graf Walter "). 
A. W. Schlegel says that Burger did not select the 
more ancient and genuine pieces in the "Reliques"; 
and, moreover, that he spoiled the simplicity of the 
originals in his translations. It was doubtless in 
■\part the success of the " Reliques" that is answerable 
ifor many collections of old English poetry put forth in 
the last years of the century. Tyrwhitt's " Chaucer" 
/and Ritson's publications have been already men- 
tioned. George Ellis, a friend and correspondent of* 
Walter Scott, and a fellow of the Society of Antiqua- 
ries, who was sometimes called " the Sainte Palaye 
of England," issued his " Specimens of Early English 
Poets" in 1790; edited in 1796 G. L. Way's transla- 
tions from French fabliaux of the twelfth and thir- 
teenth centuries; and printed in 1805 three volumes 
of " Early English Metrical Romances." 

but none of the Robin Hood ballads. Herder's preface testifies that 
the " Reliques " was the starting-point and the kernel of his whole 
undertaking. " Der Anblick dieser Sammlung giebts offenbardass 
ich eigentlich von Englischen Volksliedern ausging und auf sie 
zuriickkomme. Als vor zehn und mehr Jahren die ' Reliques of 
Ancient Poetry ' mir in die Hande fielen, freuten mich einzelne Stiicke 
so sehr, dass ich sie zu ilbersetzen versuchte." — Vorrede zu den 
Vclksliedern. Herder's Sdmmtliche Werke, Achter Thiel, s. 89 
(Carlsruhe, 1821). 



302 <i/^ History of English 'T{pmanticism. 

It is pleasant to record that Percy's labors brought 
him public recognition and the patronage of those 
whom Dr. Johnson used to call '* the great." He had 
dedicated the " Reliques " to Elizabeth Percy, Countess 
of Northumberland. Himself the son of a grocer, he 
liked to think that he was connected by blood with 
the great northern house whose exploits had been 
sung by the ancient minstrels that he loved. He 
became chaplain to the Duke of Northumberland, and 
to King George III. ; and, in 1782, Bishop of Dromore 
in Ireland, in which see he died in 181 1. 

This may be as fit a place as any to introduce some 
mention of **The Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius," 
by James Beattie; a poem once widely popular, in 
which several strands of romantic influence are seen 
twisted together. The first book was published in 
1771, the second in 1774, and the work was never com- 
pleted. It was in the Spenserian stanza, was tinged 
with the enthusiastic melancholy of the Wartons, fol- 
lowed the landscape manner of Thomson, had elegiac 
echoes of Gray, and was perhaps not unaffected, in its 
love of mountain scenery, by MacPherson's *'Ossian." 
But it took its title and its theme from a hint in Percy's 
*' Essay on the Ancient Minstrels."* Beattie was 
Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of 
Aberdeen. He was an amiable, sensitive, deeply 
religious man. He was fond of music and of nature, 
and was easily moved to tears; had *'a young girl's 
nerves," says Taine, **and an old maid's hobbies." 
Gray, who met him in 1765, when on a visit to the Earl 

* Stanzas 44-46, book i., bring in references to ballad literature in 
general and to " The Nut-Brown Maid " and " The Children in the 
Wood " in particular. 



T^^rcy and the 'ballads. 303 

of Strathmore at Glammis Castle, esteemed him 
highly. So did Dr. Johnson, partly because of his 
*' Essay on Truth " (1770), a shallow invective against 
Hume, which gained its author an interview with 
George III. and a pension of two hundred pounds a 
year. Beattie visited London in 177 1, and figured there 
as a champion of orthodoxy and a heaven-inspired 
bard. Mrs. Montagu patronized him extensively. 
Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait, with his 
''Essay on Truth " under his arm, and Truth itself in 
the background, an allegoric angel holding the bal- 
ances in one hand, and thrusting away with the other 
the figures of Prejudice, Skepticism, and Folly. Old 
Lord Lyttelton had the poet out to Hagley, and 
declared that he was Thomson come back to earth, to 
sing of virtue and of the beauties of nature. Oxford 
made him an LL. D. : he was urged to take orders in 
the Church of England; and Edinburgh offered him 
the chair of Moral Philosophy. Beattie's head was 
slightly turned by all this success, and he became 
something of a tuft-hunter. But he stuck faithfully 
to Aberdeen, whose romantic neighborhood had first 
inspired his muse. The biographers tell a pretty 
story of his teaching his little boy to look for the hand 
of God in the universe, by sowing cress in a garden 
plot in the shape of the child's initials and leading him 
by this gently persuasive analogy to read design in the 
works of nature. 

The design of " The Minstrel " is to ** trace the prog- 
ress of a Poetical Genius, born in a rude age," a 
youthful shepherd who "lived in Gothic days." But 
nothing less truly Gothic or mediaeval could easily be 
imagined than the actual process of this young poet's 



304 c^ History of English 'Romanticism, 

education. Instead of being taught to carve and ride 
and play the flute, like Chaucer's squire who 

" Cowde songes make and wel endite, 
Juste and eek daunce, and wel purtraye and write," 

Edwin wanders alone upon the mountains and in soli- 
tary places and is instructed in history, philosophy, 
and science — and even in Vergil — by an aged hermit, 
who sits on a mossy rock, with his harp beside him, and 
delivers lectures. The subject of the poem, indeed, is 
properly the education of nature; and in a way it 
anticipates Wordsworth's ''Prelude," as this hoary 
sage does the "Solitary" of ''The Excursion." Beattie 
justifies his use of Spenser's stanza on the ground that 
it " seems, from its Gothic structure and original, to 
bear some relation to the subject and spirit of the 
poem." He makes no attempt, however, to follow 
Spenser's "antique expressions." The following pas- 
sage will illustrate as well as any the romantic charac- 
ter of the whole: 

* * When the long-sounding curfew from afar 
Loaded with loud lament the lonely gale, 
Young Edwin, lighted by the evening star. 
Lingering and listening, wandered down the vale. 
There would he dream of graves and corses pale, 
And ghosts that to the charnel-dungeon throng, 
And drag a length of clanking chain, and wail, 
Till silenced by the owl's terrific song. 
Or blast that shrieks by fits the shuddering aisles along. 

" Or when the setting moon, in crimson dyed. 
Hung o'er the dark and melancholy deep. 
To haunted stream, remote from man, he hied, 
Where fays of yore their revels wont to keep; 
And there let Fancy rove at large, till sleep 
A vision brought to his entranced sight. 



Tercy and the ballads. 3^5 

And first a wildly murmuring wind gan creep 

Shrill to his ringing ear; then tapers bright. 

With instantaneous gleam, illumed the vault of night. 

' ' Anon in view a portal's blazing arch 
Arose ; the trumpet bids the valves unfold ; 
And forth a host of little warriors march, 
Grasping the diamond lance and targe of gold. 
Their look was gentle, their demeanour bold, 
And green their helms, and green their silk attire ; 
And here and there, right venerably old, 
The long-robed minstrels wake the warbling wire, 
And some with mellow breath the martial pipe inspire." * 

The influence of Thomson is clearly perceptible in 
these stanzas. ''The Minstrel," like *' The Seasons," 
abounds in insipid morality, the commonplaces of 
denunciation against luxury and ambition, and the 
praise of simplicity and innocence. The titles alone of 
Beattie's minor poems are enough to show in what 
school he was a scholar: *'The Hermit," **Ode to 
Peace," ''The Triumph of Melancholy," "Retire- 
ment," etc., etc. "The Minstrel" ran through four 
editions before the publication of its second book in 
1774. 

* Book I. stanzas 32-34. 



CHAPTER IX. 
®6Slan. 

In 1760 appeared the first installment of MacPher- 
son's ** Ossian." * Among those who received it with 
the greatest curiosity and delight was Gray, who had 
recently been helping Mason with criticisms on his 
*' Caractacus," published in 1759. From a letter to 
Walpole (June, 1760) it would seem that the latter 
had sent Gray two manuscript bits of the as yet un- 
printed "Fragments," communicated to Walpole by 
Sir David Dalrymple, who furnished Scotch ballads to 
Percy. *'Iamso charmed," wrote Gray, ''with the 
two specimens of Erse poetry, that I cannot help giv- 
ing you the trouble to inquire a little farther about 
them; and should wish to see a few lines of the origi- 
nal, that I may form some slight idea of the language, 
the measures and the rhythm. Is there anything 
known of the author or authors; and of what antiquity 
are they supposed to be? Is there any more to be had 
of equal beauty, or at all approaching it?" 

In a letter to Stonehewer (June 29,) he writes: " I 
have received another Scotch packet with a third 
specimen . . . full of nature and noble wild imagina- 

* ' ' Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of 
Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language." Edin- 
burgh, MDCCLX. 70 pp. 

306 



Ossian. 307 

tion."* And in the month following he writes to 
Wharton: ''If you have seen Stonehewer, he has 
probably told you of my old Scotch (or rather Irish) 
poetry. I am gone mad about them. They are said 
to be translations (literal and in prose) from the Erse 
tongue, done by one MacPherson, a young clergyman 
in the Highlands. He means to publish a collection 
he has of these specimens of antiquity, if it be an- 
tiquity; but what plagues me, is, I cannot come at any 
certainty on that head. I was so struck, so extasie 
with their infinite beauty, that I writ into Scotland to 
make a thousand enquiries." This is strong language 
for a man of Gray's coolly critical temper; but all his 
correspondence of about this date is filled with refer- 
ences to Ossian which enable the modern reader to 
understand in part the excitement that the book 
created among Gray's contemporaries. The letters 
that he got from MacPherson were unconvincing, 
'' ill-wrote, ill-reasoned, calculated to deceive, and yet 
not cunning enough to do it cleverly." The external 
evidence disposed him to believe the poems counter- 
feit; but the impression which they made was such 
that he was '* resolved to believe them genuine, spite 
of the Devil and the Kirk. It is impossible to con- 
vince me that they were invented by the same man 
that writes me these letters. On the other hand, it is 
almost as hard to suppose, if they are original, that he 
should be able to translate them so admirably." 

On August 7 he writes to Mason that the Erse 
fragments have been published five weeks ago in Scot- 
land, though he had not received his copy till the last 

* This was sent him by MacPherson and was a passage not given in 
the " Fragments." 



3o8 zA History of English 'Romanticism. 

week. ** I continue to think them genuine, though 
my reasons for believing the contrary are rather 
stronger than ever." David Hume, who afterward 
became skeptical as to their authenticity, wrote to 
Gray, assuring him that these poems were in every- 
body's mouth in the Highlands, and had been handed 
down from father to son, from an age beyond all 
memory and tradition. Gray's final conclusion is very 
much the same with that of the general public, to 
which the Ossianic question is even yet a puzzle. " I 
remain still in doubt about the authenticity of these 
poems, tho' inclining rather to believe them genuine 
in spite of the world. Whether they are the inven- 
tions of antiquity, or of a modern Scotchman, either 
case is to me alike unaccountable. Je m'y perdsJ" 

We are more concerned here with the impression 
which MacPherson's books, taking them just as they 
stand, made upon their contemporary Europe, than 
with the history of the controversy to which they gave 
rise, and which is still unsettled after more than a 
century and a quarter of discussion. Nevertheless, as 
this controversy began immediately upon their publi- 
cation, and had reference not only to the authenticity 
of the Ossianic poems, but also to their literary value; 
it cannot be altogether ignored in this account. The 
principal facts upon which it turned may be given in a 
nut-shell. In 1759 Mr. John Home, author of the 
tragedy of ** Douglas," who had become interested in 
the subject of Gaelic poetry, met in Dumfriesshire a 
young Scotchman, named James MacPherson, who 
was traveling as private tutor to Mr. Graham of Bal- 
gowan. MacPherson had in his possession a number 
of manuscripts which, he said, were transcripts of 



Osstan. 309 

Gaelic poems taken down from the recital of old peo- 
ple in the Highlands. He translated two of these for 
Home, who was so much struck with them that he sent 
or showed copies to Dr. Hugh Blair, Professor of 
Rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh. At the 
solicitation of Dr. Blair and Mr. Home, MacPherson 
was prevailed upon to make further translations from 
the materials in his hands; and these, to the number 
of sixteen, were published in the *' Fragments " already- 
mentioned, with a preface of eight pages by Blair. 
They attracted so much attention in Edinburgh that 
a subscription was started, to send the compiler 
through the Highlands in search of more Gaelic 
poetry. 

The result of these researches was " Fingal, an An- 
cient Epic Poem in Six Books: Together with several 
other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. 
Translated from the Gaelic language by James Mac- 
Pherson," London, 1762; together with *'Temora,-an 
Ancient Epic Poem in Eight Books," etc., etc., Lon- 
don, 1763. MacPherson asserted that he had made 
his versions from Gaelic poems ascribed to Ossian or 
Oisin, the son of Fingal or Finn MacCumhail, a chief 
renowned in Irish and Scottish song and popular 
legend. Fingal was the king of Morven, a district of 
the western Highlands, and head of the ancient war- 
like clan or race of the Feinne or Fenians. Tradition 
placed him in the third century and connected him 
with the battle of Gabhra, fought in 281. His son, 
Ossian, the warrior-bard, survived all his kindred. 
Blind and old, seated in his empty hall, or the cave of 
the rock; alone save for the white-armed Malvina, 
bride of his dead son, Oscar, he struck the harp and 



( 



c< 



310 ^ History of English %omanticism. 

sang the memories of his youth: *'a tale of the times 
of old." 

MacPherson translated — or composed — his *' Os- 
sian " in an exclamatory, abrupt, rhapsodical prose, 
resembling somewhat the English of Isaiah and others 
of the books of the prophets. The manners described 
were heroic, the state of society primitive. The prop- 
erties were few and simple; the cars of the heroes, 
their spears, helmets, and blue shields; the harp, the 
shells from which they drank in the hall, etc. Con- 

Iventional compound epithets abound, as in Homer: 
the " dark-bosomed " ships, the ** car-borne " heroes, 
the ** white-armed " maids, the *' long-bounding " dogs 
of the chase. The scenery is that of the western 

^Highlands; and the solemn monotonous rhythm of 
MacPherson's style accorded well with the tone 
of his descriptions, filling the mind with images of 
vague sublimity and desolation: the mountain torrent, 
the dark rock in the ocean, the mist on the hills, the 
ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the 
thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass 
whistling on the windy heath, the blue stream of 
Lutha, and the cliffs of sea-surrounded Gormal. It 
was noticed that there was no mention of the wolf, 
common in ancient Caledonia; nor of the thrush or 
lark or any singing bird ; nor of the salmon of the sea- 
lochs, so often referred to in modern Gaelic poetry. 
But the deer, the swan, the boar, eagle, and raven 
occur repeatedly. 

But a passage or two will exhibit the language and 
imagery of the whole better than pages of descrip- 
tion. '*I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they 
were desolate. The fire had resounded in the halls,. 



Ossian. 311 

and the voice of the people is heard no more. The 
stream of Clutha was removed from its place by the 
fall of the walls. The thistle shook there its lonely- 
head; the moss whistled to the wind. The fox looked 
out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall 
waved round its head. Desolate is the dwelling of 
Moina, silence is in the house of her fathers. Raise 
the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of 
strangers. They have but fallen before us; for, one 
day, we must fall. Why dost thou build the hall, son 
of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers 
to-day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert 
comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles 
round thy half-worn shield."* ''They rose rustling 
like a flock of sea-fowl when the waves expel them 
from the shore. Their sound was like a thousand 
streams that meet in Cona's vale, when, after a stormy 
night, they turn their dark eddies beneath the pale 
light of the morn. As the dark shades of autumn fly 
over hills of grass; so, gloomy, dark, successive came 
the chiefs of Lochlin'sf echoing woods. Tall as the 
stag of Morven, moved stately before them the King. J 
His shining shield is on his side, like a flame on the 
heath at night; when the world is silent and dark, and 
the traveler sees some ghost sporting in the beam. 
Dimly gleam the hills around, and show indistinctly 
their oaks. A blast from the troubled ocean removed 
the settled mist. The sons of Erin appear, like a 
ridge of rocks on the coast; when mariners, on shores 
unknown are trembling at veering winds." § 

The authenticity of the ''Fragments" of 1760 had 

*Froin *' Carthon." % An unconscious hexameter, 

f Scandinavia. § From " Fingal," book ii. 



312 <^ History of English '^manticism, 

not passed without question; but when MacPherson 
brought forward entire epics which, he asserted, were 
composed by a Highland bard of the third century, 
handed down through ages by oral tradition, and 
finally committed — at least in part — to writing and 
now extant in manuscripts in his possession, there 
ensued at once a very emphatic expression of in- 
credulity. Among the most truculent of the disbe- 
lievers was Dr. Johnson. He had little liking for 
Scotland, still less for the poetry of barbarism. In 
his tour of the Western Islands with Boswell in 1773, 
he showed an insensibility, and even a kind of hos- 
tility, to the wild beauties of Highland scenery, which 
gradually affects the reader with a sense of the ludi- 
crous as he watches his sturdy figure rolling along on 
a small Highland pony by sequestered Loch Ness, 
with its fringe of birch trees, or between the prodigious 
mountains that frown above Glensheal; or seated in a 
boat off the Mull of Cantyre, listening to the Erse 
songs of the rowers: 

" Breaking the silence of the seas 
Among the farthest Hebrides." 

**Dr. Johnson," says Boswell, *' owned he was now in 
a scene of as wild nature as he could see; but he cor- 
rected me sometimes in my inaccurate observations. 
*There,'said I, 'is a mountain like a cone.' Johnson: 
* No, sir. It would be called so in a book, but when 
a man comes to look at i.t, he sees it is not so. It is 
indeed pointed at the top, but one side of it is larger 
than the other.' Another mountain I called immense. 
Johnson: 'No; it is no more than a considerable 
protuberance.' " 



Ossian. z^:^ 

Johnson not only disputed the antiquity of Mac- 
Pherson's ** Ossian," but he denied it any poetic 
merit. Dr. Blair having asked him whether he thought 
any man of a modern age could have written such 
poems, he answered: "Yes, sir: many men, many 
women and many children." ** Sir," he exclaimed to . 
Reynolds, *'a man might write such stuff forever, if 
he would abandon his mind to it." To Mr. Mac- 
Queen, one of his Highland hosts, he said: ** I look 
upon MacPherson's ' Fingal ' to be as gross an impo- 
sition as ever the world was troubled with." Johnson's 
arguments were mostly a priori. He asserted that 
the ancient Gael were a barbarous people, incapable 
of producing poetry of the kind. Long epics, such as 
** Fingal" and *'Temora," could not be preserved in 
memory and handed down by word of mouth. As to 
ancient manuscripts which MacPherson pretended to 
have, there was not a Gaelic manuscript in existence 
a hundred years old. 

It is now quite well established that Dr. Johnson 
was wrong on all these points. To say nothing of the 
Homeric poems, the ancient Finns, Scandinavians, 
and Germans were as barbarous as the Gael; yet they 
produced the Kalewala, the Edda, and the Nibelungen 
Lied. The Kalewala, a poem of 22,793 lines — as long 
as the Iliad — was transmitted orally from a remote 
antiquity and first printed in 1849. As to Gaelic 
manuscripts, there are over sixty in the Advocates' 
Library at Edinburgh, varying in age from three hun- 
dred to five hundred years.* There is, e. g., the 

*See the dissertation by Rev. Archibald Clerk in his " Poems of 
Ossian in the Original Gaelic, with a literal translation into English." 
2 vols., Edinburgh, 1870. 



314 '^ History of English ^manticism. 

**Glenmasan Manuscript" of the year 1238, contain- 
ing the story of '' Darthula,"* which is the ground- 
work of the same story in MacPherson's *' Ossian." 
There is the important ''Dean of Lismore's Book," a 
manuscript collection made by Dean MacGregor of 
Lismore, Argyleshire, between 15 12 and 1529, con- 
taining 11,000 lines of Gaelic poetry, some of which is 
attributed to Ossian or Oisin. One of the poems is 
identical in substance with the first book of MacPher- 
son's "Temora;" although Mr. Campbell says, 
*' There is not one line in the Dean's book that I can 
identify with any line in MacPherson's Gaelic." f 

Other objections to the authenticity of Mac Pher- 
son's translations rested upon internal evidence, upon 
their characteristics of thought and style. It was 
alleged that the " peculiar tone of sentimental gran- 
deur and melancholy " which distinguishes them, is 
false to the spirit of all known early poetry, and is 
a modern note. In particular, it was argued, Mac- 
Pherson's heroes are too sensitive to the wild and 
sublime in nature. Professor William R. Sullivan, 
a high authority on Celtic literature, says that in the 
genuine and undoubted remains of old Irish poetry 
belonging to the Leinster or Finnian Cycle and 
ascribed to Oisin, there is much detail in descriptions 
of arms, accouterments, and articles of indoor use 

*This story has been retold, from Irish sources, in Dr. R. D. 
Joyce's poem of " Deirdre," Boston, 1876. 

f See " Leabhar na Feinne, Heroic Gaelic Ballads, Collected in 
Scotland, chiefly from 1512 to 1871. Arranged by J. F. Campbell," 
London, 1872. Selections from "The Dean of Lismore's Book" 
were edited and published at Edinburgh in 1862, by Rev. Thomas 
MacLauchlan, with a learned introduction by Mr. W. F. Skene. 



Ossian. 315 

and ornament, but very little in descriptions of out- 
ward nature.* On the other hand, the late Principal 
Shairp regards this ''sadness of tone in describing 
nature" as a strong proof of authenticity. **Two 
facts," he says, "are enough to convince me of the 
genuineness of the ancient Gaelic poetry. The truth- 
fulness with which it reflects the melancholy aspects 
of Highland scenery, the equal truthfulness with 
which it expresses the prevailing sentiment of the 
Gael, and his sad sense of his people's destiny. I need 
no other proofs that the Ossianic poetry is a native 
formation, and comes from the primeval heart of the 
Gaelic race." f And he quotes, in support of his 
view, a well-known passage from Matthew Arnold's 
''Study of Celtic Literature": "The Celts are the 
prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and 
passion, of this Titanism in poetry. A famous book, 
MacPherson's 'Ossian,' carried, in the last century, 
this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am 
not going to criticise MacPherson's ' Ossian ' here. 
Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, 
spurious in the book as large as you please; strip 
Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed 
plumes which, on the strength of MacPherson's ' Os- 
sian,' she may have stolen from that vetus et major 
Scotia — Ireland; I make no objection. But there will 
still be left in the book a residue with the very soul of 
the Celtic genius in it; and which has the proud dis- 
tinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic 
genius into contact with the nations of modern 

* Article on "Celtic Literature "in the " Encyclopaedia Britannica." 
f " Aspects of Poetry," by J. C. Shairp, 1872, pp. 244-45 (Ameri- 
can Edition), 



3i6 A History of English Romanticism. 

Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it. Woody 
Morven, and echoing Lora, and Selma with its silent 
halls! We all owe them a debt of gratitude, and when 
we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse for- 1 
get us! Choose any one of the better passages in I 
MacPherson's *Ossian,' and you can see, even at this 
time of day, what an apparition of newness and of 
power such a strain must have been in the eighteenth 
century." 

But from this same kind of internal evidence, 
Wordsworth draws just the opposite conclusion. 
**The phantom was begotten by the snug embrace of 
an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition. 
It traveled southward, where it was greeted with 
acclamation, and the thin consistence took its course 
through Europe upon the breath of popular applause.* 
. . Open this far-famed book ! I have done so at ran- 
dom, and the beginning of the epic poem 'Temora,' 
in eight books, presents itself. * The blue waves of 
UUin roll in light. The green hills are covered with 
day. Trees shake their dusky heads in the breeze. 
Gray torrents pour their noisy streams. Two green 
hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The 
blue course of a stream is there. On its banks stood 
Cairbar of Atha. His spear supports the king: the 
red eyes of his fear are sad. Cormac rises on his soul 
with all his ghastly wounds. . .* Having had the good 
fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous coun- 

* Appendix to the Preface to the Second Edition of " Lyrical Bal- 
lads." Taine says that Ossian " with Oscar, Malvina, and his whole 
troop, made the tour of Europe; and, about 1830, ended by furnishing 
baptismal names for French grisettes and perruquiers^ — English 
Literature, Vol. II. p. 220 (American Edition). 



Ossian. 3^7 

:ry, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood 
:hat pervades the volumes imposed upon the world 
jnder the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my 
Dwn eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. In 
aature everything is indistinct, yet nothing defined 
nto absolute, independent singleness. In MacPher- 
son's work it is exactly the reverse: everything (that 
is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, 
dislocated, deadened, yet nothing distinct. It will 
always be so when words are substituted for things. 
To say that the characters never could exist; that the 
manners are impossible; and that a dream has more 
substance than the whole state of society, as there 
depicted, is doing nothing more than pronouncing 
a censure which MacPherson defied. . . Yet, much 
as these pretended treasures of antiquity have been 
admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon the 
literature of the country. No succeeding writer ap- 
pears to have caught from them a ray of inspiration; 
no author in the least distinguished has ventured for- 
mally to imitate them, except the boy Chatterton, on 
their first appearance. . . This incapability to amal- 
gamate with the literature of the Island is, in my esti- 
mation, a decisive proof that the book is essentially 
unnatural; nor should I require any other to demon- 
strate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless. 
Contrast, in this respect, the effect of MacPherson's 
publication with the * Reliques ' of Percy, so unas- 
suming, so modest in their pretensions." 

Other critics have pointed out a similar indistinct- 
ness in the human actors, no less than in the landscape 
features of *' Fingal " and *' Temora." They have no 
dramatic individuality, but are all alike, and all ex- 



3i8 <iA History of English Romanticism. 

tremely shadowy. ** Poor, moaning, monotonous Mac- 
Pherson" is Carlyle's alliterative description of the 
translator of ''Ossian"; and it must be confessed 
that, in spite of the deep poetic feeling which per- 
vades these writings, and the undeniable beauty of 
single passages, they have damnable iteration. The 
burden of their song is a burden in every sense. Mr. 
Malcolm Laing, one of MacPherson's most persistent 
adversaries, who published *' Notes and Illustrations to 
Ossian " in 1805, essayed to show, by a minute analysis 
of the language, that the whole thing was a fabrica- 
tion, made up from Homer, Milton, the English Bible, 
and other sources. Thus he compared MacPherson's 
** Like the darkened moon when she moves, a dim 
circle, through heaven, and dreadful change is expected 
by men," with Milton's 

" Or from behind the moon. 
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds 
On half the nations, and with fear of change 
Perplexes monarchs." 

Laing's method proves too much and might be applied 
with like results to almost any literary work. And, 
in general, it is hazardous to draw hard and fast con- 
clusions from internal evidence of the sort just re- 
viewed. Taken altogether, these objections do leave 
a strong bias upon the mind, and were one to 
pronounce upon the genuineness of MacPherson's 
*' Ossian," as a whole, from impressions of tone and 
style, it might be guessed that whatever element 
of true ancient poetry it contains, it had been thor- 
oughly steeped in modern sentiment before it was 
put before the public. But remembering Beowulf and 



Ossian, 319 

the Norse mythology, one might hesitate to say that 
the songs of primitive, heroic ages are always insensi- 
ble to the sublime in nature; or to admit that melan- 
choly is a Celtic monopoly. 

The most damaging feature of MacPherson's case 
was his refusal or neglect to produce his originals. 
The testimony of those who helped him in collecting 
and translating leaves little doubt that he had 
materials of some kind; and that these consisted 
partly of old Gaelic manuscripts, and partly of tran- 
scriptions taken down in Gaelic from the recitation of 
aged persons in the Highlands. These testimonies 
may be read in the *' Report of the Committee of the 
Highland Society," Edinburgh, 1805.* It is too 
voluminous to examine here, and it leaves unsettled 
the point as to the precise use which MacPherson 
made of his materials, whether, /. e., he gave liberal 
renderings of them, as he professed to do; or whether 
he manipulated them — and to what extent — by piecing 
fragments together, lopping, dove-tailing, smoothing, 
interpolating, modernizing, as Percy did with his 
ballads. He was challenged to show his Gaelic 

* The Committee found that Gaelic poems, and fragments of 
poems, which they had been able to obtain, contained often the sub- 
stance, and sometimes the " literal expression (the ipsissima verba) " 
of passages given by MacPherson. " But," continues the " Report," 
" the Committee has not been able to obtain any one poem the same 
in title and tenor with the poems published by him. It is inclined 
to believe that he was in use to supply chasms and to give connection, 
by inserting passages which he did not find ; and to add what he 
conceived to be dignity and delicacy to the original composition, by 
striking out passages, by softening incidents, by refining the language: 
in short, by changing what he considered as too simple or too rude 
for a modern ear." 



320 c/^ History of English %omanticism, 

manuscripts, and Mr. Clerk says that he accepted the 
challenge. **He deposited the manuscripts at his 
publishers', Beckett and De Hondt, Strand, London. 
He advertised in the newspapers that he had done so; 
offered to publish them if a sufficient number of sub- 
scribers came forward; and in the Literary Journal 
of the year 1784, Beckett certifies that the manu- 
scripts had lain in his shop for the space of a whole 
year," * 

But this was more than twenty years after. Mr. 
Clerk does not show that Johnson or Laing or Shaw 
or Pinkerton, or any of MacPherson's numerous 
critics, ever saw any such advertisement, or knew 
where the manuscripts were to be seen; or that — 
being ignorant of Gaelic — it would have helped them 
if they had known; and he admits that "MacPher- 
son's subsequent conduct, in postponing from time to 
time the publication, when urged to it by friends who 
had liberally furnished him with means for the pur- 
pose ... is indefensible." In 1773 ^^^ i775> ^- S-t 
Dr. Johnson was calling loudly for the production of 
the manuscripts. *' The state of the question," he 
wrote to Boswell, February 7, 1775, '* is this. He and 
Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, say that he 
copied the poem from old manuscripts. His copies, 
if he had them — and I believe him to have none — are 
nothing. Where are the manuscripts? They can be 
shown if they exist, but they were never shown. De 
non existentibus et non apparentibus eadem est ratio.^* 
And during his Scotch trip in 1773, at a dinner at Sir 
Alexander Gordon's, Johnson said: **If the poems 
were really translated, they were certainly first 
* "Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Poems." See ante, p. 313. 



Ossian. 321 

written down. Let Mr. MacPherson deposit the 
manuscripts in one of the colleges at Aberdeen, where 
there are people who can judge; and if the professors 
certify their authenticity, then there will be be an end 
of the controversy. If he does not take this obvious 
and easy method, he gives the best reason to doubt." 
Indeed the subsequent history of these alleged manu- 
scripts casts the gravest suspicion on MacPherson's 
good faith. A thousand pounds were finally subscribed 
to pay for the publication of the Gaelic texts. But 
these MacPherson never published. He sent the 
manuscripts which were ultimately published in 1807 
to his executor, Mr. John Mackenzie; and he left one 
thousand pounds by his will to defray the expense of 
printing them. After MacPherson's death in 1796, Mr. 
Mackenzie '* delayed the publication from day to day, 
and at last handed over the manuscripts to the Highland 
Society,"* which had them printed in 1807, nearly 
a half century after the first appearance of the Eng- 
lish Ossian. f These, however, were not the identical 
manuscripts which MacPherson had found, or said that 
he had found, in his tour of exploration through the 
Highlands. They were all in his own handwriting or in 
that of his amanuenses. Moreover the Rev. Thomas 
Ross was employed by the society to transcribe them 

* Clerk. 

f " The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic, with a Literal 
Translation into Latin by the late Robert Macfarland, etc., Published 
under the Sanction of the Highland Society of London," 3 vols., 
London, 1807. The work included dissertations on the authenticity 
of the poems by Sir Jno. Sinclair, and the Abbe Cesarotti (trans- 
lated). Four hundred and twenty-three lines of Gaelic, being the 
alleged original of the seventh book of " Temora," had been pub- 
lished with that epic in 1763. 



322 c// History of English T^manticism. 

and conform the spelling to that of the Gaelic Bible, 
which is modern. The printed text of 1807, there- 
fore, does not represent acurately even MacPherson's 
Gaelic. Whether the transcriber took any further 
liberties than simply modernizing the spelling cannot 
be known, for the same mysterious fate that overtook 
MacPherson's original collections followed his own 
manuscript. This, after being at one time in the 
Advocates' Library, has now utterly disappeared. 
Mr. Campbell thinks that under this double process 
of distillation — a copy by MacPherson and then a 
copy by Ross — **the ancient form of the language, 
if it was ancient, could hardly survive."* "What 
would become of Chaucer," he asks, "so maltreated 
and finally spelt according to modern rules of 
grammar and orthography? I have found by experi- 
ence that an alteration in ' spelling ' may mean an 
entire change of construction and meaning, and a sub- 
stitution of whole words." 

But the Gaelic text of 1807 was attacked in more 
vital points than its spelling. It was freely charged 
with being an out-and-out fabrication, a translation 
of MacPherson's English prose into modern Gaelic. 
This question is one which must be settled by Gaelic 
scholars, and these still disagree. In 1862 Mr. Camp- 
bell wrote : " When the Gaelic * Fingal,' published in 
1807, is compared with any one of the translations 
which purport to have been made from it, it seems to 
me incomparably superior. It is far simpler in diction. 
It has a peculiar rhythm and assonance which seem to 
repel the notion of a mere translation from English, 

* " Popular Tales of the West Highlands," J. F. Campbell, 
Edinburgh, 1862. Vol. IV. p. 156. 



Ossian, 323 

as something almost absurd. It is impossible that it 
can be a translation from MacPherson's English, un- 
less there was some clever Gaelic poet* then alive, 
able and willing to write what Eton schoolboys call 
* full-sense verses.'" The general testimony is that 
MacPherson's own knowledge of Gaelic was imper- 
fect. Mr. Campbell's summary of the whole matter — 
in 1862 — is as follows: ** My theory then is, that 
about the beginning of the eighteenth century, or the 
end of the seventeenth, or earlier. Highland bards 
may have fused floating popular traditions into more 
complete forms, engrafting their own ideas on what 
they found; and that MacPherson found their works, 
translated and altered them; published the translation 
in 1760;! made the Gaelic ready for the press; pub- 
lished some of it in 1763, X ^.nd made away with the 
evidence of what he had done, when he found that his 
conduct was blamed. I can see no other way out of 
the maze of testimony." But by 1872 Mr. Campbell 
had come to a conclusion much less favorable to the 
claims of the Gaelic text. He now considers that the 
English was first composed by MacPherson and that 
''he and other translators afterward worked at it and 
made a Gaelic equivalent whose merit varies accord- 
ing to the translator's skill and knowledge of Gaelic." § 
On the other hand, two of the foremost authorities 
in Gaelic, Mr. W. F. Skene and Mr. Archibald Clerk, 
are confident that the Gaelic is the original and the 

* He suggests Lachlan MacPherson of Strathmashie, one of Mac- 
Pherson's helpers. " Popular Tales of the West Highlands." 
f " Fragments," etc. 

X Seventh book of " Temora." See ante, p. 321. 
§ " Leabhar Na Feinne," p. xii. 



324 <^ History of English l^omanticism, 

English the translation. Mr. Clerk, who reprinted 
the Highland Society's text in 1870,* with a literal 
translation of his own on alternate pages and Mac- 
Pherson's English at the foot of the page, believes 
implicitly in the antiquity and genuineness of the 
Gaelic originals. *' MacPherson," he writes, ''got 
much from manuscripts and much from oral recita- 
tion. It is most probable that he has given the minor 
poems exactly as he found them. He may have made 
considerable changes in the larger ones in giving 
them their present form; although I do not believe 
that he, or any of his assistants, added much even 
in the way of connecting links between the various 
episodes." 

To a reader unacquainted with Gaelic, comparing 
MacPherson's English with Mr. Clerk's, it certainly 
looks unlikely that the Gaelic can be merely a trans- 
lation from the former. The reflection in a mirror 
cannot be more distinct than the object it reflects; and 
if Mr. Clerk's version can be trusted (it appears to be 
more literal though less rhetorical than MacPherson's) 
the Gaelic is often concrete and sharp where Mac- 
Pherson is general; often plain where he is figura- 
tive or ornate; and sometimes of a meaning quite 
different from his rendering. Take, e. g., the clos- 
ing passage of the second **Duan," or book, of 
*'Fingal." 

''An arrow found his manly breast. He sleeps 
with his loved Galbina at the noise of the sounding 
surge. Their green tombs are seen by the mariner, 
when he bounds on the waves of the north." — 
MacPherson. 

* See ante, p. 313, note. 



Ossian. 325 

*' A ruthless arrow found his breast. 
His sleep is by thy side, Galbina, 
Where wrestles the wind with ocean. 
The sailor sees their graves as one, 
When rising on the ridge of the waves." 

—Clerk. 

But again Mr. x\rchibald Sinclair, a Glasgow pub- 
lisher, a letter from whom is given by Mr. Campbell 
in his ''Tales of the West Highlands," has ''no hesi- 
tation in affirming that a considerable portion of the 
Gaelic which is published as the original of his 
[MacPherson's] translation, is actually translated 
back from the English." And Professor Sullivan 
says: "The so-called originals are a very curious 
kind of mosaic, constructed evidently with great labor 
afterward, in which sentences or parts of sentences of 
genuine poems are cemented together in a very inferior 
word-paste of MacPherson's own." * 

It is of course no longer possible to maintain what 
Mr. Campbell says is the commonest English opinion, 
viz., that MacPherson invented the characters and 
incidents of his "Ossian," and that the poems had no 1/ 
previous existence in any shape. The evidence is 
overwhelming that there existed, both in Ireland and 
the Scottish Highlands traditions, tales, and poems 
popularly attributed to Oisin, the son of Finn Mac- 
Cumhail. But no poem has been found which corre- 
sponds exactly to any single piece in MacPherson ; and 
Sullivan cites, as one proof of the modern and spurious 
character of these versions, the fact that they mingle 
names from the ancient hero-cycle, like Darthula, 
CuthuUin, and Conlach, with names belonging to 

*" Encylopsedia Britaunica" : "Celtic Literature." 



326 A History of English Romanticism, 

the Finnian cycle, as is never the case in the 
authentic and undoubted remains of Celtic poetry. 
Between 1760, the date of MacPherson's ** Frag- 
ments," and 1807, the date of the Highland Society's 
text, there had been published independently nine 
hundred lines of Ossianic verse in Gaelic in Gillie's 
collection, 1786, and Stewart's, 1804. In 1780 Dr, 
Smith had published his ''Ancient Lays," a free 
translation from Gaelic fragments, which he subse- 
quently printed (1787) under the title **Sean Dana," 
Smith frankly took liberties with his originals, such 
as we may suppose that MacPherson took with his; 
but he made no secret of this and, by giving the 
Gaelic on which his paraphrase rested, he enabled the 
public to see how far his '' Ancient Lays," were really 
ancient, and how far they were built up into poetic 
wholes by his own editorial labors.* 

Wordsworth's assertion of the failure of Mac- 
Pherson's ** Ossian " to ''amalgamate with the liter- 
ature of the island " needs some qualification. That 
it did not enter into English literature in a formative 
way, as Percy's ballads did, is true enough, and is 
easy of explanation. In the first place, it was pro- 
fessedly a prose translation from poetry in another 
tongue, and could hardly, therefore, influence the 
verse and diction of English poetry directly. It could 
not even work upon them as directly as many foreign 
literatures have worked; as the ancient classical 
literatures, e. g.^ have always worked; or as Italian 

*For a further account of the state of the "authenticity" ques- 
tion, see Archibald McNeil's " Notes on the Authenticity of Ossian's 
Poems," 1868; and an article on " Ossian " in Macmillan's 
Magazine, XXIV. 113-25. 



Ossian. 327 

and French and German have at various times worked; 
for the Gaelic was practically inaccessible to all but 
a few special scholars. Whatever its beauty or 
expressiveness, it was in worse case than a dead 
language, for it was marked with the stigma of 
barbarism. In its palmiest days it had never been 
what the Germans call a Cultursprache; and now it 
was the idiom of a few thousand peasants and moun- 
taineers, and was rapidly becoming extinct even in its 
native fastnesses. 

Whatever effect was to be wrought by the Ossianic 
poems upon the English mind, was to be wrought in 
the dress which MacPherson had given them. And 
perhaps, after all, the tumid and rhetorical cast of 
MacPherson's prose had a great deal to do with 
producing the extraordinary enthusiasm with which 
his **wild paraphrases," as Mr. Campbell calls them, 
were received by the public. The age was tired of 
polish, of wit, of over-civilization; it was groping 
toward the rude, the primitive, the heroic; had begun 
to steep itself in melancholy sentiment and to feel a 
dawning admiration of mountain solitudes and the 
hoary past. Suddenly here was what it had been 
waiting for — "a tale of the times of old"; and the 
solemn, dirge-like chant of MacPherson's sentences, 
with the peculiar manner of his narrative, its repeti- 
tions, its want of transitions, suited well with his 
matter. ^' Men had been talking under their breath, 
and in a mincing dialect so long," says Leslie Stephen, 
"that they were easily gratified and easily imposed 
upon by an affectation of vigorous and natural 
sentiment." 

The impression was temporary, but it was imme- 



328 A History of English Romanticism. 

diate and powerful. Wordsworth was wrong when he 
said that no author of distinction except Chatterton 
had ventured formally to imitate Ossian. A genera- 
tion after the appearance of the '' Fragments " we find 
the youthful Coleridge alluding to ''Ossian" in the 
preface* to his first collection of poems (1793), which 
contains two verse imitations of the same, as ecce 
signum : 

' ' How long will ye round me be swelling, 
O ye blue-tumbling waves of the sea ? 
Not always in caves was my dwelling, 

Nor beneath the cold blast of the tree," etc., etc. f 

In Byron's ''Hours of Idleness" (1807), published 
when he was a Cambridge undergraduate, is a piece of 
prose founded on the episode of Nisus and Euryalus 
in the "^neid" and entitled "The Death of Calmar 
and Orla — An Imitation of MacPherson's Ossian." 
" What form rises on the roar of clouds? Whose dark 
ghost gleams in the red stream of tempests? His 
voice rolls on the thunder. 'Tis Orla, the brown chief 
of Orthona . . . Lovely wast thou, son of blue-eyed 
Morla," etc. After reading several pages of such 
stuff, one comes to feel that Byron could do this sort 
of thing about as well as MacPherson himself; and 
indeed, that Johnson was not so very far wrong when 
he said that anyone could do it if he would abandon 
his mind to it. Chatterton applied the Ossianic ver- 
biage in a number of pieces which he pretended to 
have translated from the Saxon: "Ethelgar," " Ken- 

* " The sweet voice of Cona never sounds so sweetly as when it 
speaks of itself." 

f " The Complaint of Ninathoma." 



Ossian. 329 

rick," *'Cerdick," and ** Gorthmund"; as well as in a 
composition which he called '' Godred Cro van," from 
the Manx dialect, and one from the ancient British, 
which he entitled ''The Heilas." He did not catch 
the trick quite so successfully as Byron, as a passage 
or two from '* Kenrick " will show: "Awake, son of 
Eldulph! Thou that sleepest on the white mountain, 
with the fairest of women; no more pursue the dark 
brown wolf: arise from the mossy bank of the falling 
waters: let thy garments be stained in blood, and the 
streams of life discolor thy girdle . . . Cealwulf of the 
high mountain, who viewed the first rays of the morn- 
ing star, swift as the flying deer, strong as a young oak, 
fiery as an evening wolf, drew his sword; glittering 
like the blue vapors in the valley of Horso: terrible 
as the red lightning bursting from the dark-brown 
clouds, his swift bark rode over the foaming waves 
like the wind in the tempest." 

In a note on his Ossianic imitation, Byron said that 
Mr. Laing had proved Ossian an impostor, but that 
the merit of MacPherson's work remained, although 
in parts his diction was turgid and bombastic* A 
poem in the "Hours of Idleness," upon the Scotch 
mountain " Lachin Y Gair," has two Ossianic lines in 
quotation points — 

" Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices 
Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale ? " 

Byron attributed much importance to his early recol- 
lections of Highland scenery, which he said had pre- 
pared him to love the Alps and "blue Friuli's 

* For some MS. notes of Byron in a copy of " Ossian," see Phelps' 
** English Romantic Movement," pp. 153-54. 



33° A History of English Romanticism, 

mountains," and ** the Acroceraunian mountains of 
old name." But the influence of Ossian upon Byron 
and his older contemporaries was manifested in subtler 
ways than in formal imitations. It fell in with that 
current of feeling which Carlyle called " Wertherism," 
and helped to swell it. It chimed with the tone 
that sounds through the German Sturm und Drang 
period; that impatience of restraint, that longing to 
give full swing to the claims of the elementary pas- 
sions, and that desperation when these are checked by 
the arrangements of modern society, which we encoun- 
ter in Rousseau and the young Goethe. Hence the 
romantic gloom, the Byronic Zerrissenheit, to use 
Heine's word, which drove the poet from the rubs of 
social life to waste places of nature and sometimes to 
suicide. In such a mood the mind recurred to the 
language of Ossian, as the fit expression of its own in- 
definite and stormy griefs. 

^' Homer," writes Werther, ** has been superseded in 
my heart by the divine Ossian. Through what a world 
does this angelic bard carry me! With him I wander 
over barren wastes and frightful wilds; surrounded by 
whirlwinds and hurricanes, trace by the feeble light of 
the moon the shades of our noble ancestors; hear from 
the mountainous heights, intermingled with the roar- 
ing of waves and cataracts, their plaintive tones steal- 
ing from cavernous recesses; while the pensive 
monody of some love-stricken maiden, who heaves 
her departing sighs over the moss-clad grave of the 
warrior by whom she was adored, makes up the inar- 
ticulate concert. I trace this bard, with his silver 
locks, as he wanders in the valley and explores the 
footsteps of his fathers. Alas! no vestige remains 



Ossian, 331 

but their tombs. His thought then hangs on the 
silver moon, as her sinking beams play upon the rip- 
pling main; and the remembrance of deeds past and 
gone recurs to the hero's mind — deeds of times when 
he gloried in the approach of danger, and emulation 
nerved his whole frame; when the pale orb shone upon 
his bark, laden with the spoils of his enemy, and illu- 
minated his triumphant return. When I see depicted 
on his countenance a bosom full of woe; v/hen I be- 
hold his heroic greatness sinking into the grave, and 
he exclaims, as he throws a glance at the cold sod 
which is to lie upon him: * Hither will the traveler 
who is sensible of my worth bend his weary steps, and 
seek the soul-enlivening bard, the illustrious son of 
Fingal; his foot will tread upon my tomb, but his eyes 
shall never behold me'; at this time it is, my dear 
friend, that, like some renowned and chivalrous 
knight, I could instantly draw my sword; rescue my 
prince from a long, irksome existence of languor and 
pain; and then finish by plunging the weapon into my 
own breast, that I might accompany the demi-gcd 
whom my hand had emancipated." * 

In his last interview with Charlotte, Werther, who 
had already determined upon suicide, reads aloud to 
her, from ''The Songs of Selma," ''that tender pas- 
sage wherein Armin deplores the loss of his beloved 
daughter. 'Alone on the sea-beat rocks, my daughter 
was heard to complain. Frequent and loud were her 
cries. What could her father do? All night I stood 
on the shore. I saw her by the faint beam of the 
moon,' " etc. The reading is interrupted by a mutual 
flood of tears. "They traced the similitude of their 
* "Sorrows of Werther," Letter Ixviii. 



332 A History of English Romanticism. 

own misfortune in this unhappy tale. . . The pointed 
allusion of those words to the situation of Werther 
rushed with all the electric rapidity of lightning to the 
inmost recesses of his soul." 

It is significant that one of Ossian's most fervent 
admirers was Chateaubriand, who has been called the 
inventor of modern melancholy and of the primeval 
forest. Here is a passage from his '* Genie du 
Christianisme ": * ''Under a cloudy sky, on the coast 
of that sea whose tempests were sung by Ossian, their 
Gothic architecture has something grand and somber. 
Seated on a shattered altar in the Orkneys, the traveler 
is astonished at the dreariness of those places: sudden 
fogs, vales where rises the sepulchral stone, streams 
flowing through wild heaths, a few reddish pine trees, 
scattered over a naked desert studded with patches of 
snow; such are the only objects which present them- 
selves to his view. The wind circulates among the 
ruins, and their innumerable crevices become so many 
tubes, which heave a thousand sighs. Long grasses 
wave in the apertures of the domes, and beyond these 
apertures you behold the flitting clouds and the soar- 
ing sea-eagle. . . Long will those four stones which 
mark the tombs of heroes on the moors of Caledonia, 
long will they continue to attract the contemplative 
traveler. Oscar and Malvina are gone, but nothing is 
changed in their solitary country. 'Tis no longer the 
hand of the bard himself that sweeps the harp; the 
tones we hear are the slight trembling of the strings, 
produced by the touch of a spirit, when announcing at 
night, in a lonely chamber, the death of a hero. . . 
So when he sits in the silence of noon in the valley of 

* *' Caledonia, or Ancient Scotland," book ii, chapter vii. part iv. 



Ossian, 333 

his breezes is the murmur of the mountain to Ossian's 
ear: the gale drowns it often in its course, but the 
pleasant sound returns again." 

In Byron's passion for night and tempest, for the 
wilderness, the mountains, and the sea, it is of course 
impossible to say how large a share is attributable 
directly to MacPherson's "Ossian," or more remotely, 
through Chateaubriand and other inheritors of the 
Ossianic mood. The influence of any particular book 
becomes dispersed and blended with a hundred cur- 
rents that are in the air. But I think one has often a 
consciousness of Ossian in reading such passages 
as the famous apostrophe to the ocean in "Childe 
Harold "— 

" Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll ! " — 

which recalls the address to the sun in Carthon — "O 
thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my 
fathers," — perhaps the most hackneyed locus classicus 
in the entire work; or as the lines beginning, 

" O that the desert were my dwelling place ; "* 
or the description of the storm in the Jura: 

" And this is in the night : Most glorious night I 
Thou wert not sent for slumber. Let me be 
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight 
A portion of the tempest and of thee." * 

Walter Scott, while yet a lad, made acquaintance 
with Ossian through Dr. Blacklock, and was at 
first delighted; but "the tawdry repetitions of the 
Ossianic phraseology," he confesses, "disgusted me 

* " Childe Harold," canto iii. 



334 A History of English Romanticism. 

•rather sooner than might have been expected from my 
age." He afterward contributed an essay on the 
authenticity of the poems to the proceedings of the 
Speculative Club of Edinburgh. In one sense of the 
word Scott was the most romantic of romanticists; 
but in another sense he was very little romantic, and 
there was not much in his sane, cheerful, and robust na- 
ture upon which such poetry as Ossian could fasten.* 
It is just at this point, indeed, that definitions diverge » 
and the two streams of romantic tendency part 
company. These Carlyle has called " Wertherism " 
and "Gotzism":f i.e., sentimentalism and mediseval- 
ism, though so mild a word as sentimentalism fails to 
express adequately the morbid despair to which 
" Werther" gave utterance,, and has associations with 
works of a very different kind, such as the fictions of 
Richardson and Sterne. In England, Scott became 
the foremost representative of *' Gotzism," and Byron 
of '* Wertherism." The pessimistic, sardonic heroes 
of "Manfred," ''Childe Harold," and *' The Corsair" 
were the latest results of the *' II Penseroso " literature, 
and their melodramatic excesses already foretokened 
a reaction. 

Among other testimonies to Ossian's popularity in 
England are the numerous experiments at versify- 
ing MacPherson's prose. These were not over- 
sucessful and only a few of them require mention 
here. The Rev. John Wodrow, a Scotch minister, 

* The same is true of Burns, though references to Cuthullin's dog 
Luath, in " TheTwa Dogs " ; to " Caric-thura " in " The Whistle " ; 
and to " Cath-Loda " in the notes on "The Vision," show that 
Burns knew his Ossian. 

f From Goethe's " Gotz von Berlichingen." 



Ossian. 335 

'^attempted" "Carthon," '' The Death of Cuthullin " 
and ''Darthula" in heroic conplets, in 1769; and 
*'Fingar'in 1771. In the preface to his *' Fingal," 
he maintained that there was no reasonable doubt 
of the antiquity and authenticity of MacPherson's 
*' Ossian." '* Fingal " — which seems to have been the 
favorite — was again turned into heroic couplets by 
Ewen Cameron, in 1776, prefaced by the attestations of 
a number of Highland gentlemen to the genuineness 
of the originals; and by an argumentative introduc- 
tion, in which the author quotes Dr. Blair's dictum 
that Ossian was the equal of Homer and Vergil "in 
strength of imagination, in grandeur of sentiment, and 
in native majesty of passion." National pride enlisted 
most of the Scotch scholars on the affirmative side of 
the question, and made the authenticity of Ossian 
almost an article of belief. Wodrow's heroics were 
merely respectable. The quality of Cameron's may be 
guessed from a half dozen lines: 

" When Moran, one commissioned to explore 
The distant seas, came running from the shore 
And thus exclaimed — ' Cuthullin, rise ! The ships 
Of snowy Lochlin hide the rolling deeps. 
Innumerable foes the land invade, 
And Swaran seems determined to succeed.' " 

Whatever impressiveness belonged to MacPherson's 
cadenced prose was lost in these metrical versions, 
which furnish a perfect reductio ad absurdu?n of the 
critical folly that compared Ossian with Homer. 
Homer could not be put in any dress through which 
the beauty and interest of the original would not 
appear. Still again, in 1786, '' Fingal" was done into 



33^ ^ History of English Romanticism, 

heroics by a Mr. R. Hole, who varied his measures 
with occasional ballad stanzas, thus: 

*• But many a fair shall melt with woe 
At thy soft strain in future days, 
And many a manly bosom glow, 
Congenial to thy lofty lays." 

These versions were all emitted in Scotland. But as 
late as 1814 ** Fingal " appeared once more in verse, 
this time in London, and in a variety of meters by Mr. 
George Harvey; who, in his preface, expressed the 
hope that Walter Scott would feel moved to cast 
''Ossian" into the form of a metrical romance, like 
''Marmion" or ** The Lay of the Last Minstrel." 
The best English poem constructed from MacPherson 
is **The Six Bards of Ossian Versified," by Sir Eger- 
ton Brydges (dated in 1784).* The passage selected 
was the one which Gray so greatly admired, f from a 
note to ** Croma," in the original " Fragments," Six 
bards who have met at the hall of a chieftain, on an 
October night, go out one after another to observe the 
weather, and return to report their observations, each 
ending with the refrain ** Receive me from the night, 
my friends." The whole episode is singularly arrest- 
ing, and carries a conviction of reality too often want- 
ing in the epic portions of MacPherson's collection. 

Walpole, at first, was nearly as much charmed by 
the *' Fragments " as Gray had been. He wrote to 
Dalrymple that they were real poetry, natural poetry, 
like the poetry of the East. He liked particularly the 

* See " Poems by Saml. Egerton Brydges," 4th ed., London, 1807. 
pp. 87-96. 

f See ante, p. 117. 



Ossian. 337 

synonym for an echo — ''son of the rock"; and in a 
later letter he said that all doubts which he might 
once have entertained as to their genuineness had dis- 
appeared. But Walpole's literary judgments were 
notoriously capricious. In his subsequent correspond- 
ence with Mason and others, he became very con- 
temptuous of MacPherson's **cold skeleton of an 
epic poem, that is more insipid than 'Leonidas.'" 
"Ossian," he tells Mason, in a letter dated March, 
1783, has become quite incredible to him; but Mrs. 
Montagu — the founder of the Blue Stocking Club — 
still *' holds her feast of shells in her feather dressing- 
room." 

The Celtic Homer met with an even warmer wel- 
come abroad than at home. He was rendered into 
French,* German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, and 
possibly other languages. Bonaparte was a great 
lover of Ossian, and carried about with him a copy of 
Cesarotti's Italian version. A resemblance has been 
fancied between MacPherson's manner and the gran- 
diloquent style of Bonaparte's bulletins and dis- 
patches, f In Germany Ossian naturally took most 
strongly. He was translated into hexameters by a 
Vienna Jesuit named Michael Denis J and produced 
many imitations. Herder gave three translations 
from ''Ossian" in his " Stimmen der Volker " (1778- 
79) and prefixed to the whole collection an essay 

* There were French translations by Letourneur in 1777 and 1810 : 
by Lacaussade in 1842 ; and an imitation by Baour-Lormian in 
1801. 

f See Perry's " Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 417. 

\ One suspects this translator to have been of Irish descent. He 
was born at Scharding, Bavaria, in 1729. 



33^ A History of English Romanticism. 

*'Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Volker" written 
in 1773. Schiller was one of the converts; Klopstock 
and his circle called themselves '* bards"; and an 
exclamatory and violent mannerism came into vogue, 
known in German literary history as Bardengebriiil. 
MacPherson's personal history need not be followed 
here in detail. In 1764 he went to Pensacola as sec- 
retary to Governor Johnston. He was afterward a 
government pamphleteer, writing against Junius and 
in favor of taxing the American colonies. He was 
appointed agent to the Nabob of Arcot; sat in Parlia- 
ment for the borough of Camelford, and built a hand- 
some Italian villa in his native parish; died in 1796, 
leaving a large fortune, and was buried in Westminster 
Abbey. In 1773 he was ill-advised enough to render 
the '* Iliad" into Ossianic prose. The translation was 
overwhelmed with ridicule, and probably did much to 
increase the growing disbelief in the genuineness of 
^'Fingal" and "Temora." 



CHAPTER X. 

XTbomas Cbatterton. 

The history of English romanticism has its tragedy: 
the life and death of Thomas Chatterton — 

" The marvelous boy, 
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride." * 

The Story has been often told, but it may be told 
again here; for, aside from its dramatic interest, and 
leaving out of question the absolute value of the 
Rowley poems, it is most instructive as to the con- 
ditions which brought about the romantic revival. 
It shows by what process antiquarianism became 
poetry. 

The scene of the story was the ancient city of 
Bristol — old Saxon Bricgestowe, ** place of the 
bridge " — bridge, namely, over the Avon stream, not 
far above its confluence with the Severn. Here Chat- 
terton was born in 1752, the posthumous son of a dis- 
sipated schoolmaster, whose ancestors for a hundred 
and fifty years had been, in unbroken succession, sex- 
tons to the church of St. Mary Redcliffe. Perhaps it 
may be more than an idle fancy to attribute to hered- 
ity the bent which Chatterton's genius took sponta- 
neously and almost from infancy; to guess that some 
mysterious ante-natal influence — ''striking the electric 

* Wordsworth, " Resolution and Independence." 



340 A History of English Romanticism. 

chain wherewith we are darkly bound " — may have set 
vibrating links of unconscious association running 
back through the centuries. Be this as it may, Chat- 
terton was the child of Redcliffe Church. St. Mary 
stood by his cradle and rocked it; and if he did not 
inherit with his blood, or draw in with his mother's 
milk a veneration for her ancient pile; at least the 
waters of her baptismal font* seemed to have signed 
him with the token of her service. Just as truly as 
" The Castle of Otranto " was sprung from Strawberry 
Hill, the Rowley poems were born of St. Mary's 
Church. 

Chatterton's father had not succeeded to the sexton- 
ship, but he was a sub-chanter in Bristol Cathedral, 
and his house and school in Pile Street were only a 
few yards from Redcliffe Church, In this house 
Chatterton was born, under the eaves almost of the 
sanctuary; and when his mother removed soon after 
to another house, where she maintained herself by 
keeping a little dame's school and doing needle work, 
it was still on Redcliffe Hill and in close neighbor- 
hood to St. Mary's. The church itself — ''the pride 
of Bristowe and the western land " — is described as 
**one of the finest parish churches in England,"! 
a rich specimen of late Gothic or "decorated " style; 
its building or restoration dating from the middle of 
the fifteenth century. Chatterton's uncle by marriage, 
Richard Phillips, had become sexton in 1748, and the 
boy had the run of the aisles and transepts. The 

* January i, 1753. 

f " The Poetical Works of Thos. Chatterton. With an Essay on 
the Rowley Poems by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat and a Memoir by 
Edward Bell "; in two volumes. London, 1871, Vol, I. p. xv. 



Thomas Chatter ton, 341 

stone effigies of knights, priests, magistrates, and 
other ancient civic worthies stirred into life under his 
intense and brooding imagination; his mind took color 
from the red and blue patterns thrown on the pave- 
ment by the stained glass of the windows; and he may- 
well have spelled out much of the little Latin that he 
knew from **the knightly brasses of the tombs" and 
" cold hie jacets of the dead." 

It is curious how early his education was self-deter- 
mined to its peculiar ends. A dreamy, silent, solitary 
child, given to fits of moodiness, he was accounted 
dull and even stupid. He would not, or could not, 
learn his letters until, in his seventh year, his eye was 
caught by the illuminated capitals in an old music 
folio. From these his mother taught him the alphabet, 
and a little later he learned to read from a black-letter 
Bible. ** Paint me an angel with wings and a trum- 
pet," he answered, when asked what device he would 
choose for the little earthenware bowl that had been 
promised him as a gift* Colston's Hospital, where 
he was put to school, was built on the site of a demol- 
ished monastery of Carmelite Friars; the scholars 
wore blue coats, with metal plates on their breasts 
stamped with the image of a dolphin, the armorial 
crest of the founder, and had their hair cropped short 
in imitation of the monkish tonsure. As the boy 
grew into a youth, there were numbered among his 
near acquaintances, along with the vintners, sugar- 
bakers, pipe-makers, apothecaries, and other trades- 
men of the Bristol bourgeoisie^ two church organists, a 
miniature painter, and an engraver of coats-of-arms — 

* VVillcox's edition of " Chatterton's Poetical Works," Cambridge, 
1842, Vol. I. p. xxi. 



342 A History of English Romanticism. 

figures quaintly suggestive of that mingling of munic- 
ipal life and ecclesiastical-mediaeval art which is repro- 
duced in the Rowley poems. 

** Chatterton," testifies one of his early acquaint- 
ances, ** was fond of walking in the fields, particularly 
in Redcliffe meadows, and of talking of his manuscripts, 
and sometimes reading them there. There was one 
spot in particular, full in view of the church, in which 
he seemed to take a peculiar delight. He would fre- 
quently lay himself down, fix his eyes upon the church, 
and seem as if he were in a kind of trance. Then on 
a sudden he would tell me: 'That steeple was burnt 
down by lightning: that was the place where they 
formerly acted plays.' " ''Among his early studies," we 
are told, "antiquities, and especially the surroundings 
of mediaeval life, were the favorite subjects; heraldry 
seems especially to have had a fascination for him. 
He supplied himself with charcoal, black-lead, ochre, 
and other colors; and with these it was his delight to 
delineate, in rough and quaint figures, churches, 
castles, tombs of mailed warriors, heraldic emblazon- 
ments, and other like belongings of the old world." * 

Is there not, a breath of the cloister in all this, re- 
minding one of the child martyr in Chaucer's " Prior- 
esse Tale," the " litel clergeon, seven yeer of age"? 

" This litel child his litel book lerninge, 
As he sat in the scole at his prymer, 
He * Alma redemptoris ' herde singe, 
As children lerned hir antiphoner." 

A choir boy bred in cathedral closes, catching his 
glimpses of the sky not through green boughs, but 

* " Memoir by Edward Bell," p. xxiv. 



Thomas Chaiierton. 343 

through the treetops of the episcopal gardens dis- 
colored by the lancet windows of the clear-stories; 
dreaming in the organ loft in the pauses of the music, 

\/hen 

" The choristers, sitting with faces aslant, 
Feel the silence to consecrate more than the chant." 

Thus Chatterton's sensitive genius was taking the 
impress of its environment. As he pored upon the 
antiquities of his native city, the idea of its life did 
sweetly creep into his study of imagination; and he 
gradually constructed for himself a picture of fifteenth- 
century Bristol, including a group of figures, partly 
historical and partly fabulous, all centering about 
Master William Canyngej Canynge was the rich 
Bristol merchant who founded or restored St. Mary 
Redcliffe's; was several times mayor of the city in 
the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV., and once 
represented the borough in Parliament. Chatterton 
found or fabled that he at length took holy orders and 
became dean of Westbury College. About Canynge 
Chatterton arranged a number of dramatis personce, 
some of whose names he discovered in old records 
and documents, such as Carpenter, Bishop of Wor- 
cester, and Sir Theobald Gorges, a knight of Wraxhall, 
near Bristol; together with others entirely of his own 
invention — as John a Iscam, whom he represents to 
have been a canon of St. Augustine's Abbey in Bristol; 
and especially one Thomas Rowley, parish priest of 
St. John's, employed by Canynge to collect manu- 
scripts and antiquities. He was his poet laureate and 
father confessor, and to him Chatterton ascribed most 
of the verses which pass under the general name of 
the Rowley poems. But Iscam was also a poet and 



344 A History of English Romanticism. 

Master Canynge himself sometimes burst into song. 
Samples of the Iscam and the Canynge muse diversify 
the collection. The great Bristol merchant was a 
mediaeval Maecenas, and at his house, **nempned the 
Red Lodge," were played interludes — '' Aella," " Godd- 
wyn," and "The Parliament of Sprites" — composed 
by Rowley, or by Rowley and Iscam collaborating. 
Canynge sometimes wrote the prologues; and Rowley 
fed his patron with soft dedication and complimentary 
verses: *'On Our Lady's Church," "Letter to the 
dygne Master Canynge," " The Account of W. Can- 
ynges Feast," etc. The well-known fifteenth-century 
poet Lydgate is also introduced into this literary ce'ftacle, 
as John Ladgate, and made to exchange verse epistles 
with Rowley in eighteenth-century fashion. Such 
is the remarkable fiction which the marvelous boy 
erected, as a scaffolding for the fabric of sham-antique 
poetry and prose, which he built up during the years 
1767 to 1770, /. e., from the fifteenth to the eighteenth 
year of his age. 

There is a wide distance between the achievements 
of this untaught lad of humble birth and narrow 
opportunities, and the works of the great Sir Walter, 
with his matured powers and his stores of solid 
antiquarian lore. But the impulse that conducted 
them to their not dissimilar tasks was the same. In 
"Yarrow Revisited," Wordsworth uses, apropos of 
Scott, the expression "localized romance." It was, 
indeed, the absorbing local feeling of Scott, his 
patriotism, his family pride, his attachment to the 
soil, that brought passion and poetry into his histori- 
cal pursuits. With Chatterton, too, this absorption 
in the past derived its intensity from his love of place. 



Thomas Chatterton. 345 

Bristol was his world; in '* The Battle of Hastings," 
he did not forget to introduce a Bristowan contingent, 
led by a certain fabulous Alfwold, and performing 
prodigies of valor upon the Normans. The image of 
mediaeval life which he succeeded in creating was, of 
course, a poor, iscint simulacrum^ compared with Scott's. 
He lacked knowledge, leisure, friends, long life — 
everything that was needed to give his work solidity. 
All that he had was a creative, though undisciplined 
imagination, together with an astonishing industry, 
persistence, and secretiveness. Yet with all his dis- 
advantages, his work, with all its imperfections, is far 
more striking than the imitative verse of the Wartons, 
or the thin, diffused mediaevalism of Walpole and 
Clara Reeve. It is the product of a more original 
mind and a more intense conception. 

In the muniment room over the north porch of 
St. Mary Redcliffe's were several old chests filled 
with parchments: architectural memoranda, church- 
wardens' accounts, inventories of vestments, and 
similar parish documents. One of these chests, 
known as Master Canynge's coffer, had been broken 
open some years before, and whatever was of value 
among its contents removed to a place of safety. The 
remainder of the parchments had been left scattered 
about, and Chatterton's father had carried a number 
of them home and used them to cover copy-books. 
The boy's eye was attracted by these yellow sheep- 
skins, with their antique script; he appropriated them 
and kept them locked up in his room. 

How early he conceived the idea of making this 
treasure-trove responsible for the Rowley myth, which 
was beginning to take shape in his mind, is uncertain. 



346 A History of English Romanticism. 

According to the testimony of a schoolfellow, by 
name Thistlethwaite, Chatterton told him in the 
summer of 1764 that he had a number of old manu- 
scripts, found in a chest in Redcliffe Church, and 
that he had lent one of them to Thomas Philips, an 
usher in Colston's Hospital. Thistlethwaite says that 
Philips showed him this manuscript, a piece of vellum 
pared close around the edge, on which was traced in 
pale and yellow writing, as if faded with age, a poem 
which he thinks identical with ** Elinoure and Juga," 
afterward published by Chatterton in the Town and 
Country Magazine for May, 1769. One is inclined to 
distrust this evidence. **The Castle of Otranto" was 
first published in December, 1764, and the ''Reliques," 
only in the year following. The latter was certainly 
known to Chatterton; many of the Rowley poems, 
''The Bristowe Tragedie," e. g., and the minstrel 
songs in "Aella," show ballad influence*; while it 
seems not unlikely that Chatterton was moved to take 
a hint from the disguise — slight as it was — assumed by 
Walpole in the preface to his romance, f But perhaps 
this was not needed to suggest to Chatterton that the 
surest way to win attention to his poems would be to 
ascribe them to some fictitious bard of the Middle 
Ages. It was the day of literary forgery; the Ossian 
controversy was raging, and the tide of popular favor 

* Cf. (" Battle of Hastings," i. xx) 

" The grey-goose pinion, that thereon was set, 
Eftsoons with smoking crimson blood was wet " 

with the lines from " Chevy Chase " {ante, p. 295). To be sure the 
ballad was widely current before the publication of the " Reliques." 
f See ante, p. 237. 



Thomas Chatterton. 347 

set strongly toward the antique. A series of avowed 
imitations of old English poetry, however clever, 
would have had small success. But the discovery of 
a hitherto unknown fifteenth-century poet was an 
announcement sure to interest the learned and per- 
haps a large part of the reading public. Besides, 
instances are not rare where a writer has done his 
best work under a mask. The poems composed by 
Chatterton in the disguise of Rowley — a dramatically 
imagined persona behind which he lost his own 
identity — are full of a curious attractiveness; while 
his acknowledged pieces are naught. It is not worth 
while to bear down very heavily on the moral aspects 
of this kind of deception. The question is one of 
literary methods rather than of ethics. If the writer 
succeeds by the skill of his imitations, and the 
ingenuity of the evidence that he brings to support 
them, in actually imposing upon the public for a time, 
the success justifies the attempt. The artist's purpose 
is to create a certain impression, and the choice of 
means must be left to himself. 

^ In the summer of 1764 Chatterton was barely twelve, 
and wonderful as his precocity was, it is doubtful 
whether he had got so far in the evolution of the 
Rowley legend as Thistlethwaite's story would imply. 
But it is certain that three years later, in the spring 
of 1767, Chatterton gave Mr. Henry Burgum, a worthy 
pewterer of Bristol, a parchment emblazoned with the 
*'de Bergham,'* coat-of-arms, which he pretended to 
have found in St. Mary's Church, furnishing him also 
with two copy-books, in which were transcribed the 
*'de Bergham," pedigree, together with three poems 
in pseudo-antique spelling. One of these, ''The 



348 A History of English Romanticism. 

Tournament," described a joust in which figured one 
Sir Johan de Berghamme, a presumable ancestor of 
the gratified pewterer. Another of them, **The 
Romaunte of the Cnyghte," purported to be the work 
of this hero of the tilt-yard, "who spent his whole 
life in tilting," but notwithstanding found time to 
write several books and translate *'some part of the 
Iliad under the title ' Romance of Troy.' " 

All this stuff was greedily swallowed by Burgum, 
and the marvelous boy next proceeded to befool Mr. 
William Barrett, a surgeon and antiquary who was 
engaged in writing a history of Bristol. To him 
he supplied copies of supposed documents in the 
muniment room of Redcliffe Church: **0f the Aun- 
tiaunte Forme of Monies," and the like: deeds, 
bills, letters, inscriptions, proclamations, accounts of 
churches and other buildings, collected by Rowley 
for his patron, Canynge : many of which this singularly 
uncritical historian incorporated in his "History of 
Bristol," published some twenty years later. He also 
imparted to Barrett two Rowleian poems, " The Parlia- 
ment of Sprites," and "The Battle of Hastings" (in 
two quite different versions). In September, 1768, a 
new bridge was opened at Bristol over the Avon; and 
Chatterton, who had now been apprenticed to an 
attorney, took advantage of the occasion to send 
anonymously to the printer of Farley s Bristol Journal 
a description of the mayor's first passing over the old 
bridge in the reign of Henry II. This was composed 
in obsolete language and alleged to have been copied 
from a contemporary manuscript. It was the first 
published of Chatterton's fabrications. In the 
years 1768-69 he produced and gave to Mr. George 



Thomas Chatterton. 349 

Catcott the long tragical interlude ''Aella," ''The 
Bristowe Tragedie," and other shorter pieces, all of 
which he declared to be transcripts from manuscripts 
in Canynge's chest, and the work of Thomas Rowley, 
a secular priest of Bristol, who flourished about 1460. 
Catcott was a local book-collector and the partner 
of Mr. Burgum. He was subsequently nicknamed 
"Rowley's midwife." 

In December, 1768, Chatterton opened a corre- 
spondence with James Dodsley, the London publisher, 
saying that several ancient poems had fallen into his 
hands, copies of w^hich he offered to supply him, if he 
would send a guinea to cover expenses. He inclosed 
a specimen of "^lla." ''The motive that actuates 
me to do this," he wrote, "is to convince the world 
that the monks (of whom some have so despicable an 
opinion) were not such blockheads as generally 
thought, and that good poetry might be wrote in the 
dark days of superstition, as well as in these more 
enlightened ages." Dodsley took no notice of the 
letters, and the owner of the Rowley manuscripts next 
turned to Horace Walpole, whose tastes as a virtuoso, 
a lover of Gothic, and a romancer m.ight be counted on 
to enlist his curiosity in Chatterton's find. The docu- 
ment which he prepared for Walpole was a prose paper 
entitled "The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, 
wroten by T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge," 
and containing inter alia, the following extraordi- 
nary "anecdote of painting" about Afflem, an Anglo- 
Saxon glass-stainer of Edmond's reign who was taken 
prisoner by the Danes. "Inkarde, a soldyer of the 
Danes, was to slea hym; onne the Nete before the 
Feeste of Deathe hee founde Afilem to bee hys Broder. 



35 o A History of English Komanticisr,i. 

Affrighte chaynede uppe hys soule. Gastnesse dwelled 
yn his Breaste. Oscarre, the greate Dane, gave hest 
hee shulde bee forslagene with the commeynge Sunne: 
no tears colde availe; the morne cladde yn roabes of 
ghastness was come, whan the Danique Kynge be- 
hested Oscarre to arraie hys Knyghtes eftsoones for 
Warre. Afflem was put yn theyre flyeynge Battailes, 
sawe his Countrie ensconced wyth Foemen, hadde hys 
Wyfe ande Chyldrenne brogten Capteeves to hys 
Shyppe, ande was deieynge v/ythe Soorowe, whanne 
the loude blautaunte Wynde hurled the Battayie 
agaynste an Heck. Forfraughte wythe emboileynge 
waves, he sawe hys Broder, Wyfe and Chyldrenne 
synke to Deathe: himself v/as throwen onne a Banke 
ynne the Isle of Wyghte, to lyve hys iyfe forgard to 
all Emmoise: thus moche for Afflem." * 

This paper was accompanied with notes explaining 
queer words and giving short biographical sketches 
of Canynge, Rowley, and other imaginary characters, 
such as John, second abbot of St. Austin's Minster, 
who was the first English painter in oils and also the 
greatest poet of his age. ''Take a specimen of his 
poetry, * On King Richard I.': 

*" Harte of Lyone! shake thie Sworde, 

Bare thie mortheynge steinede honde,' etc." 

The whole was inclosed in a short note to Walpole, 
which ran thus: 

* Walter Scott quotes this passage in his review of Southey and 
Cottle's edition of Chatterton in the Edinburgh Review for April, 
1804, and comments as follows: " While Chatterton wrote plain nar- 
rative, he imitated with considerable success the dry, concise style of 
an antique annalist; but when anything required a more dignified or 
sentimental style, he mounted the fatal and easily recognized car of 
the son of Fingal." 



Thomas Chatterton. 351 

" Sir, Being versed a little in antiquitys, I have met 
with several curious manuscripts, among which the 
following may be of Service to you, in any future Edi- 
tion of your truly entertaining Anecdotes of Painting.* 
In correcting the mistakes (if any) in the Notes, you 
will greatly oblige 

"Your most humble Servant, 

** Thomas Chatterton." 

Walpole replied civilly, thanking his correspondent 
for what he had sent and for his offer of communica- 
ting his manuscripts, but disclaiming any ability to cor- 
rect Chatterton's notes. ''I have not the happiness of 
understanding the Saxon language, and, without your 
learned notes, should not have been able to compre- 
hend Rowley's text." He asks where Rowley's poems 
are to be found, offers to print them, and pronounces 
the Abbot John's verses "wonderful for their har- 
mony and spirit." This encouragement called out 
a second letter from Chatterton, with another and 
longer extract from the "Historic of Peyncteynge yn 
Englande," including translations into the Rowley 
dialect of passages from a pair of mythical Saxon 
poets: Ecca, Bishop of Hereford, and Elmar, Bishop 
of Selseie, "fetyve yn Workes of ghastlienesse," as 
ecce signum: 

" Nowe maie alle Helle open to golpe thee downe," etc. 

But by this time Walpole had begun to suspect 
imposture. He had been lately bitten in the Ossian 
business and had grown wary in consequence. More- 

* Publication begun 1761: 2d edition 1768. Chatterton's letter was 
dated March 25 [1769]. 



352 c^ History of English Romanticism. 

over, Chatterton had been incautious enough to show 
his hand in his second letter (March 30). **He in- 
formed me," said Walpole, in his history of the affair, 
**that he was the son of a poor widow . . . that he 
was clerk or apprentice to an attorney, but had a taste 
and turn for more elegant studies; and hinted a wish 
that I would assist him with my interest in emerging 
out of so dull a profession, by procuring him some 
place." Meanwhile, distrusting his own scholar- 
ship, Walpole had shown the manuscripts to his 
friends Gray and Mason, who promptly pronounced 
them modern fabrications and recommended him to 
return them without further notice. But Walpole, 
good-naturedly considering that it was no ''grave 
crime in a young bard to have forged false notes of 
hand that were to pass current only in the parish of 
Parnassus," wrote his ingenious correspondent a letter 
of well-meant advice, counseling him to stick to his 
profession, and saying that he **had communicated 
his transcripts to much better judges, and that they 
were by no means satisfied with the authenticity of 
his supposed manuscripts." Chatterton then wrote 
for his manuscripts, and after some delay — Walpole 
having been absent in Paris for several months — they 
were returned to him. 

In 1769 Chatterton had begun contributing mis- 
cellaneous articles, in prose and verse, to the Town 
and Country Magazine^ a London periodical. Among 
these appeared the eclogue of *' Elinoure and Juga," * 
the only one of the Rowley poems printed during its 
author's lifetime. He had now turned his pen to the 
service of politics, espousing the side of Wilkes and 

* See anie^ p. 346. 



Thomas Chatterton. 353 

liberty. In April, 1770, he left Bristol for London, 
and cast himself upon the hazardous fortunes of a 
literary career. Most tragical is the story of the 
poor, unfriended lad's struggle against fate for the 
next few months. He scribbled incessantly for 
the papers, receiving little or no pay. Starvation 
confronted him; he was too proud to ask help, and 
on August 24 he took poison and died, at the age 
of seventeen years and nine months. 

With Chatterton's acknowledged writings we have 
nothing here to do; they include satires in the manner 
of Churchill, political letters in the manner of Junius, 
squibs, lampoons, verse epistles, elegies, ** African 
eclogues," a comic burletta, '*The Revenge "—played 
at Maryiebone Gardens shortly after his death — with 
essays and sketches in the style that the Spectator 
and Rambler had made familiar: ''The Adventures 
of a Star," ''The Memoirs of a Sad Dog," and the 
like. They exhibit a precocious cleverness, but have 
no value and no interest to-day. One gets from 
Chatterton's letters and miscellanies an unpleasant 
impression of his character. There is not only the 
hectic quality of too early ripeness which one detects 
in Keats' correspondence; and the defiant swagger, 
the affectation of wickedness and knowingness that 
one encounters in the youthful Byron, and that is apt 
to attend the stormy burst of irregular genius upon 
the world; but there are things that imply a more 
radical unscrupulousness. But it would be harsh to 
urge any such impressions against one who was no 
more than a boy when he perished, and whose brief 
career had struggled through cold obstruction to its 
bitter end. The best traits in Chatterton's character 



354 ^ History of English %omantidsm. 

appear to have been his proud spirit of independence 
and his warm family affections. 

The death of an obscure penny-a-liner, like young 
Chatterton, made little noise at first. But gradually 
it became rumored about in London literary coteries 
that manuscripts of an interesting kind existed at 
Bristol, purporting to be transcripts from old English 
poems; and that the finder, or fabricator, of the same 
was the unhappy lad who had taken arsenic the other 
day, to anticipate a slower death from hunger. It 
was in April, 177 1, that Walpole first heard of the fate 
of his would-be /r^/<?^/. *' Dining," he says, ^'at the 
Royal Academy, Dr. Goldsmith drew the attention of 
the company with an account of a marvelous treasure 
of ancient poems lately discovered at Bristol, and ex- 
pressed enthusiastic belief in them; for which he was 
laughed at by Dr. Johnson, who was present. I soon 
found this was the trouvaille of my friend Chatterton, 
and I told Dr. Goldsmith that this novelty was known 
to me, who might, if I had pleased, have had the honor 
of ushering the great discovery to the learned world. 
You may imagine, sir, we did not all agree in the 
measure of our faith; but though his credulity diverted 
me, my mirth was soon dashed; for, on asking about 
Chatterton, he told me he had been in London and 
had destroyed himself." 

With the exception of " Elinour and Juga," already 
mentioned, the Rowley poems were still unprinted. 
The manuscripts, in Chatterton's handwriting, were 
mostly in the possession of Barrett and Catcott. They 
purported to be copies of Rowley's originals; but of 
these alleged originals, the only specimens brought 
forward by Chatterton were a few scraps of parchment 



Thomas Chatter ton. 355 

containing, in one instance, the first thirty-four lines 
of the poem entitled " The Storie of William Canynge "; 
in another a prose account of one " Symonne de Byr- 
tonne," and, in still others, the whole of the short-verse 
pieces, *' Songe to Aella " and " The Accounte of W. 
Canynge's Feast." These scraps of vellum are de- 
scribed as about six inches square, smeared with glue 
or brown varnish, or stained with ochre, to give them 
an appearance of age. Thomas Warton had seen one 
of them, and pronounced it a clumsy forgery; the 
script not of the fifteenth century, but unmistakably 
modern. Southey describes another as written, for 
the most part, in an attorney's regular engrossing 
hand. Mr. Skeat '* cannot find the slightest indica- 
tion that Chatterton had ever seen a MS. of early 
date; on the contrary, he never uses the common con- 
tractions, and he was singularly addicted to the use 
of capitals, which in old MSS. are rather scarce." 

Boswell tells how he and Johnson went ddwn to 
Bristol in April, 1776, "where I was entertained with 
seeing him inquire upon the spot into the authenticity 
of Rowley's poetry, as I had seen him inquire upon 
the spot into the authenticity of Ossian's poetry. 
Johnson said of Chatterton, *This is the most extraor- 
dinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. 
It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things. ' " 

In 1777, seven years after Chatterton's death, his 
Rowley poems were first collected and published by 
Thomas Tyrwhitt, the Chaucerian editor, who gave, 
in an appendix, his reasons for believing that Chat- 
terton was their real author, and Rowley a myth.* 

* " Poems supposed to have been written at' Bristol by Thomas 
Rowley and others in the fifteenth century. The greatest part now 



35 6 c^ History of English l^manticism. 

These reasons are convincing to any modern scholar. 
Tyrwhitt's opinion was shared at the time by all com- 
petent authorities — Gray, Thomas Warton, and Ma- 
lone, the editor of the variorum Shakspere, among 
others. Nevertheless, a controversy sprang up over 
Rowley, only less lively than the dispute about Os- 
sian, which had been going on since 1760. Rowley's 
most prominent champions were the Rev. Dr. Symmes, 
who wrote in the London Review; the Rev. Dr. Sher- 
w4n, in the Gentle7na7i's Magazine; Dr. Jacob Bryant,* 
and Jeremiah Milles, D. D., Dean of Exeter, who pub- 
lished a sumptuous quarto edition of the poems in 
1782. t These asserters of Rowley belonged to the 
class of amateur scholars whom Edgar Poe used to 
speak of as ** cultivated old clergymen." They had 
the usual classical training of Oxford and Cambridge 
graduates, but no precise knowledge of old English 
literature. They had the benevolent curiosity of Mr. 
Pickwick, and the gullibility — the large, easy swallow 
— which seems to go with the clerico-antiquarian habit 
of mind. 

Nothing is so extinct as an extinct controversy; and, 
unlike the Ossian puzzle, which was a harder nut to 
crack, this Rowley controversy was really settled from 



first published from the most authentic copies, with engraved speci- 
mens of one of the MSS. To which are added a preface, an intro- 
ductory account of the several pieces, and a glossary. London: 
Printed for T. Payne & Son at the Mews Gate. MDCCLXXVII." 

"* Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley," 2 vols. 
1781. 

*' f Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol in the fifteenth 
century by Thomas Rowley, Priest, etc. With a commentary in 
which the antiquity of them is considered and defended." 



Thomas Chatter ton. 357 

the start. It is not essential to our purpose to give 
any extended history of it. The evidence relied upon 
by the supporters of Rowley was mainly of the exter- 
nal kind: personal testimony, and especially the ante- 
cedent unlikeliness that a boy of Chatterton's age and 
imperfect education could have reared such an elab- 
orate structure of deceit; together with the inferiority 
of his acknowledged writings to the poems that he 
ascribed to Rowley. But Tyrwhitt was a scholar of 
unusual thoroughness and acuteness; and, having a 
special acquaintance with early English, he was able 
to bring to the decision of the question evidence of an 
internal nature which became more convincing in pro- 
portion as the knowledge necessary to understand his 
argument increased; /. <?., as the number of readers in- 
creased, who knew something about old English poe- 
try. Indeed, it was nothing but the general ignorance 
of the spelling, flexions, vocabulary, and scansion of 
Middle English verse, that made the controversy 
possible. 

Tyrwhitt pointed out that the Rowleian dialect was 
not English of the fifteenth century, nor of any cen- 
tury, but a grotesque jumble of archaic words of very 
different periods and dialects. The orthography and 
grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old 
English poet known to the student of literature. The 
fact that Rowley used constantly the possessive pro- 
nominal form ttfs, instead of his; or the other fact that 
he used the termination efi in the singular of the verb, 
was alone enough to stamp the poems as spurious. 
Tyrwhitt also showed that the syntax, diction, idioms, 
and stanza forms were modern; that if modern words 
were substituted throughout for the antique, and the 



35^ tA History of English ^manticism, 

spelling modernized, the verse would read like eight- 
eenth-century work. ** If anyone," says Scott, in his 
review of the Southey and Cottle edition, "resists the 
internal evidence of the style of Rowley's poems, we 
make him welcome to the rest of the argument; to his 
belief that the Saxons imported heraldry and gave 
armorial bearings (which were not known till the time 
of the Crusades); that Mr. Robert [sic] Canynge, in 
the reign of Edward IV., encouraged drawing and had 
private theatricals." In this article Scott points out 
a curious blunder of Chatterton's which has become 
historic, though it is only one of a thousand. In the 
description of the cook in the General Prologue to the 
** Canterbury Tales," Chaucer had written: 

" But gret harm was it, as it thoughte me, 
That on his schyne a mormal hadde he, 
For blankmanger he made with the beste." 

Mormal, in this passage, means a cancerous sore, and 
blafikmanger is a certain dish or confection — the 
modern blancmange. But a confused recollection of 
the whole was in Chatterton's mind, when, among the 
fragments of paper and parchment which he covered 
with imitations of ancient script, and which are now 
in the British Museum,— '* The Yellow Roll," "The 
Purple Roll," etc., — he inserted the following title in 
" The Rolls of St. Bartholomew's Priory," purporting 
to be old medical prescriptions: "The cure of mor- 
malles and the waterie leprosie; the rolle of the blacke 
mainger"; turning Chaucer's innocent blankmanger 
into some kind of imaginary black mange. 

Skeat believes that Chatterton had read very little 
of Chaucer, probably only a small portion of the Pro- 



Thomas Chatterton, 359 

logue to the ''Canterbury Tales." " If he had really- 
taken pains," he thinks, ** to read and study Chaucer 
or Lydgate or any old author earlier than the age of 
Spenser, the Rowley poems would have been very 
different. They would then have borne some resem- 
blance to the language of the fifteenth century, whereas 
they are rather less like the language of that period 
than of any other. The spelling of the words is fre- 
quently too late, or too bizarre, whilst many of the 
words themselves are too archaic or too uncommon.'* * 
But this internal evidence, which was so satisfactory 
to Scott, was so little convincing to Chatterton's con- 
temporaries that Tyrwhitt felt called upon to publish 
in 1782 a "Vindication" of his appendix; and Thomas 
Warton put forth in the same year an *' Enquiry," in 
which he reached practically the same conclusions 
with Tyrwhitt. And yet Warton had devoted the 
twenty-sixth section of the second volume of his 
''History of English Poetry " (1778,) to a review of 
the Rowley poems, on the ground that *' as they are 
held to be real by many respectable critics, it was his 
duty to give them a place in this series": a curious 
testimony to the uncertainty of the public mind on 
the question, and a half admission that the poems 
might possibly turn out to be genuine, f 

Tyrwhitt proved clearly enough that Chatterton 
wrote the Rowley poems, but it was reserved for Mr. 
Skeat to show just how he wrote them. The modus 
operandi was SLhout as follows: Chatterton first made, 

* " Essay on the Rowley Poems : " Skeat's edition of "Chatterton's 
Poetical Works," Vol. II. p. xxvii. 

f For a bibliography of the Rowley controversy, consult the article 
on Chatterton in the " Dictionary of National Biography." 



360 c^ History of English l^o?nantidsm. 

for his private use, a manuscript glossary, by copying 
out the words in the glossary to Speght's edition of 
Chaucer, and those marked as old in Bailey's and 
Kersey's English Dictionaries. Next he wrote his 
poem in modern English, and finally rewrote it, sub- 
stituting the archaic words for their modern equiva- 
lents, and altering the spelling throughout into an 
exaggerated imitation of the antique spelling in 
Speght's Chaucer. The mistakes that he made are 
instructive, as showing how closely he followed his 
authorities, and how little independent knowledge he 
had of genuine old English. Thus, to give a few 
typical examples of the many in Mr. Skeat's notes: in 
Kersey's dictionar}?- occurs the word gare, defined as 
** cause." This is the verb^^r, familiar to all readers 
of Burns,* and meaning to cause, to make; but Chat- 
terton, taking it for the noun, cause, employs it with 
grotesque incorrectness in such connections as these: 

' ' Perchance in Virtue's gare rhyme might be then " : 
" If in this battle luck deserts our gare." 

Again the Middle English howten (Modern English, 
hoot) is defined by Speght as "hallow," /. ^., halloo. 
But Kersey and Bailey misprint this "hollow"; and 
Chatterton, entering it so in his manuscript list of old 
words, evidently takes it to be the adjective "hollow" 
and uses it thus in the line: 

" Houten are wordes for to telle his doe," i. e., 
Hollow are words to tell his doings. 

Still again, in a passage already quoted, f it is told how 

* " Ah, gentle dames ! it gars me greet." 

— Tarn 0^ Shanter. 
\Ante, p. 350. 



Thomas Chatterton. 361 

the ** Wynde hurled the Battayle " — Rowleian for a 

small boat — ''agaynste an Heck." Heck in this and 

other passages was a puzzle. From the context it 

obviously meant " rock," but where did Chatterton get 

it? Mr. Skeat explains this. Heck is a provincial 

word signifying **rack,"/. e.^ *' hay-rack "; but Kersey 

misprinted it *' rock," and Chatterton followed him. 

A typical instance of the kind of error that Chatterton 

was perpetually committing was his understanding the 

*' Listed, bounded," /. e., edged (as in the 'Mist" or 

selvage of cloth) for '* bounded" in the sense of 

jumped^ and so coining from it the verb '* to liss " = 

to jump: 

" The headed javelin lisseth here and there." 

Every page in the Rowley poems abounds in forms 
which would have been as strange to an Englishman 
of the fifteenth as they are to one of the nineteenth 
century. Adjectives are used for nouns, nouns for 
verbs, past participles for present infinitives; and 
derivatives and variants are employed which never had 
any existence, such as hopelen = hopelessness, and 
a7tere = another. Skeat says, that ''an analysis of 
the glossary in Milles's edition shows that the genuine 
old English words correctly used, occurring in the 
Rowleian dialect, amount to only about seven per 
cent, of all the old words employed." It is probable 
that, by constant use of his manuscript glossary, the 
words became fixed in Chatterton's memory and he 
acquired some facility in composing at first hand in 
this odd jargon. Thus he uses the archaic words quite 
freely as rhyme words, which he would not have been 
likely to do unless he had formed the habit of thinking, 
to some degree, in Rowleian. 



362 ^ History of English %omanticism. 

The question now occurs, apart from the tragic 
interest of Chatterton's career, from the mystery con- 
nected with the incubation and hatching of the Rowley 
poems, and from their value as records of a very 
unusual precocity — what independent worth have they 
as poetry, and what has been the extent of their 
literary influence? The dust of controversy has long 
since settled, and what has its subsidence made visible? 
My own belief is that the Rowley poems are interest- 
ing principally as literary curiosities — the work of an 
infant phenomenon — and that they have little impor- 
tance in themselves, or as models and inspirations to 
later poets. I cannot help thinking that, upon this 
subject, many critics have lost their heads. Malone, 
e. g., pronounced Chatterton the greatest genius that 
England had produced since Shakspere. Professor 
Masson permits himself to say: ** These antique 
poems of Chatterton are perhaps as worthy of being 
read consecutively as many portions of the poetry of 
Byron, Shelley, or Keats. There are passages in 
them, at least, quite equal to any to be found in these 
poets.'** Mr. Gosse seems to me much nearer the 
truth: **Our estimate of the complete originality of 
the Rowley poems must be tempered by a recollection 
of the existence of * The Castle of Otranto ' and 
* The Schoolmistress,' of the popularity of Percy's 
*Reliques' and the * Odes' of Gray, and of the 
revival of a taste for Gothic literature and art which 
dates from Chatterton's infancy. Hence the claim 
which has been made for Chatterton as the father of 
the romantic school, and as having influenced the actual 

*" Chatterton. A Story of the Year 1770," by David Masson, 
London, 1874. 



Thomas Chatter ton. 363 

style of Coleridge and Keats, though supported with 
great ability, appears to be overcharged. So also the 
positive praise given to the Rowley poems, as artistic 
productions full of rich color and romantic melody, may 
be deprecated without any refusal to recognize these 
qualities in measure. There are frequent flashes of 
brilliancy in Chatterton, and one or two very perfectly 
sustained pieces; but the main part of his work, if 
rigorously isolated from the melodramatic romance of 
his career, is surely found to be rather poor reading, 
the work of a child of exalted genius, no doubt, yet 
manifestly the work of a child all through." * 

Let us get a little closer to the Rowley poems, as 
they stand in Mr. Skeat's edition, stripped of their sham- 
antique spelling and with their language modernized 
wherever possible; and we shall find, I think, that, 
tried by an absolute standard, they are markedly 
inferior not only to true mediaeval work like Chaucer's 
poems and the English and Scottish ballads, but also 
to the best modern work conceived in the same spirit: 
to ''Christabel " and ''The Eve of St. Agnes," and 
" Jock o' Hazeldean " and ** Sister Helen," and '' The 
Haystack in the Flood." The longest of the Rowley 
poems is "Aella," ''a tragycal enterlude or dis- 
coorseynge tragedie " in 147 stanzas, and generally 
regarded as Chatterton's masterpiece, f The scene of 
this tragedy is Bristol and the neighboring Watchet 

* " Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 334. 

f A recent critic, the Hon. Roden Noel (" Essays on Poetry and 
Poets," London, 1886), thinks that " ' Aella' is a drama worthy of 
the Elizabethans " (p. 44). '* As to the Rowley series," as a whole, 
he does "not hesitate to say that they contain some of the finest 
poetry in our language" (p. 39). The choric "Ode to Freedom" 
in " Goddwyn " appears to Mr. Noel to be the original of a much 



364 z/1 History of English "Romanticism. 

Mead; the period, during the Danish invasions. The 
hero is the warden of Bristol Castle.* While he is 
absent on a victorious campaign against the Danes, his 
bride, Bertha, is decoyed from home by his treacherous 
lieutenant, Celmond, who is about to ravish her in the 
forest, when he is surprised and killed by a band of 
marauders. Meanwhile Aella has returned home, and, 
finding that his wife has fled, stabs himself mortally. 
Bertha arrives in time to hear his dying speech and 
make the necessary explanations, and then dies herself 
on the body of her lord. It will be seen that the plot 
is sufficiently melodramatic; the sentiments and dia- 
logue are entirely modern, when translated out of 
Rowleian into English. The verse is a modified form 
of the Spenserian, a ten-line stanza which Mr. Skeat 
says is an invention of Chatterton and a striking 
instance of his originality, f It answers very well in 
descriptive passages and soliloquies; not so well in 
the " discoorseynge " parts. As this is Chatterton's 
favorite stanza, in which ^'The Battle of Hastings," 
** Goddwyn," '* English Metamorphosis "and others of 
the Rowley series are written, an example of it may be 
cited here, from "Aella." 

Scene^ Bristol. Celmond, alone. 
The world is dark with night ; the winds are still, 
Faintly the moon her pallid light makes gleam; 
The risen sprites the silent churchyard fill, 

admired passage in "Childe Harold," in which war is personified, 
" and at any rate is finer " ! 

* See in Wm. Hewitt's *' Homes of the Poets," Vol. I. pp. 264-307, 
the description of a drawing of this building in 1138, done by Chatter- 
ton and inserted in Barrett's " History." 

f For some remarks on Chatterton's metrical originality, see 
*' Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. pp. 400-403, 



Thomas Chatterton. 365 

With elfin fairies joining in the dream ; 
The forest shineth with the silver leme ; 
Now may my love be sated in its treat ; 
Upon the brink of some swift running stream, 
At the sweet banquet I will sweetly eat. 
This is the house ; quickly, ye hinds, appear. 

Enter a servant. 
Cel. Go tell to Bertha straight, a stranger waiteth here. 

The Rowley poems include, among other things, 
a number of dramatic or quasi-dramatic pieces, 
''Goddwyn," ''The Tournament," "The Parliament 
of Sprites"; the narrative poem of "The Battle of 
Hastings," and a collection of " eclogues." These are 
all in long-stanza forms, mostly in the ten-lined stanza. 
" English Metamorphosis " is an imitation of apassage 
in "The Faerie Queene," (book ii. canto x. stanzas 
5-19). "The Parliament of Sprites " is an interlude 
played by Carmelite friars at William Canynge's house 
on the occasion of the dedication of St. Mary Red- 
cliffe's. One after another the antichi spiriti dolenti 
rise up and salute the new edifice: Nimrod and the 
Assyrians, Anglo-Saxon ealdormen and Norman knights 
templars, and citizens of ancient Bristol. Among 
others, " Elle's sprite speaks ": 

" Were I once more cast in a mortal frame, 
To hear the chantry-song sound in mine ear, 
To hear the masses to our holy dame, 
To view the cross-aisles and the arches fair ! 
Through the half-hidden silver-twinkling glare 
Of yon bright moon in foggy mantles dressed, 
I must content this building to aspere,'^ 
Whilst broken clouds the holy sight arrest ; 
Till, as the nights grow old, I fly the light. 
Oh ! were I man again, to see the sight ! '* 

* Look at. 



366 cA History of English %omanticism. 

Perhaps the most engaging of the Rowley poems 
are "An Excelente Balade of Charitie," written in the 
rhyme royal; and ''The Bristowe Tragedie," in the 
common ballad stanza, and said by Tyrwhitt to be 
founded on an historical fact: the execution at Bristol, 
in 1401, of Sir Baldwin Fulford, who fought on the 
Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. The best 
quality in Chatterton's verse is its unexpectedness, — 
sudden epithets or whole lines, of a wild and artless 
sweetness, — which goes far to explain the fascination 
that he exercised over Coleridge and Keats. I mean 
such touches as these: 

*' Once as I dozing in the witch-hour lay." 

** Brown as the filbert dropping from the shell." 

*' Mygorme emblanched with the comfreie plant." 

" Where thou may'st here the sweete ni^ht-lark chant. 
Or with some mocking brooklet sweetly glide." 

** Upon his bloody carnage-house he lay, 
Whilst his long shield did gleam with the sun's rising ray." 

" The red y-painted oars from the black tide, 
Carved with devices rare, do shimmering rise." 

" As elfin fairies, when the moon shines bright, 
'In little circles dance upon the green ; 
All living creatures fly far from their sight, 
Nor by the race of destiny be seen ; 
For what he be that elfin fairies strike, 
Their souls will wander to King Offa's dyke." 

The charming wildness of Chatterton's imagination 
• — which attracted the notice of that strange, visionary 
genius William Blake * — is perhaps seen at its best in 

* Blake was an early adherent of the " Gothic artists who built the 
Cathedrals in the so-called Dark Ages ... of whom the world was 



X 



X. 

Thomas Chatterton. 

one of the minstrel songs in *'Aella." This 
viously an echo of Ophelia's song in "Hamlet," . 
Chatterton gives it a weird turn of his own: 

** Hark ! the raven flaps his wing 

In the briared dell below ; ^ 

Hark ! the death-owl loud doth sing 

To the nightmares, as they go. 

My love is dead. 

Gone to his death-bed 

All under the willow tree. 

'* See the white moon shines on high,* 
Whiter is my true-love's shroud. 
Whiter than the morning sky, 
Whiter than the evening cloud. 
My love is dead," etc. 

It remains to consider briefly the influence of Chatter- 
ton's life and writings upon his contemporaries and 
successors in the field of romantic poetry. The 
dramatic features of his personal career drew, natu- 
rally, quite as much if not more attention than his 
literary legacy to posterity. It was about nine years 
after his death that a clerical gentleman, Sir Herbert 
Croft, went to Bristol to gather materials for a biog- 
raphy. He talked with Barrett and Catcott, and with 
many of the poet's schoolmates and fellow-townsmen, 
and visited his mother and sister, who told him anec- 
dotes of the marvelous boy's childhood and gave him 

not worthy." Mr. Rossetti has pointed out his obligations to Ossian 
and possibly to " The Castle of Otranto." See Blake's poems 
'* Fair Eleanor" and " Gwin, King of Norway." 

* Chatterton's sister testifies that he had the romantic habit of 
sitting up all night and writing by moonlight. Cambridge Ed. 
p. Ixi. 

ft 



368 A History of English %omanticism. 

some of his letters. Croft also traced Chatterton's 
footsteps in London, where he interviewed, among 
others, the coroner who had presided at the inquest 
over the suicide's body. The result of these inquiries 
he gave to the world in a book entitled **Love and 
Madness" (1780).* Southey thought that Croft had 
treated Mrs. Chatterton shabbily, in making her no 
pecuniary return from the profits of his book; and 
arraigned him publicly for this in the edition of 
Chatterton's works which he and Joseph Cottle — both 
native Bristowans — published in three volumes in 
1803. This was at first designed to be a subscription 
edition for the benefit of Chatterton's mother and 
sister, but, the subscriptions not being numerous 
enough, it was issued in the usual way, through **the 
trade." 

It was in 1795, just a quarter of a century after 
Chatterton's death, that Southey and Coleridge were 
married in St. Mary Redcliffe's Church to the Misses 
Edith and Sara Fricker. Coleridge was greatly 
interested in Chatterton. In his ** Lines on Observ- 
ing a Blossom on the First of February, 1796," he 
compares the flower to 

" Bristowa's bard, the wondrous boy, 
An amaranth which earth seemed scarce to own, 
Blooming 'mid poverty's drear wintry waste." 

And a little earlier than this, when meditating his 
pantisocracy scheme with Southey and Lovell, he had 
addressed the dead poet in his indignant ** Monody 
on the Death of Chatterton," associating him in 

* Other standard lives of Chatterton are those by Gregory, 1789, 
(reprinted and prefixed to the Southey and Cottle edition): Dix, 
1837 ; and Wilson, 1869. 



Thomas Chatterton. 369 

imagination with the abortive community on the 
Susquehannah: 

" O Chatterton, that thou wert yet alive ! 
Sure thou would'st spread thy canvas to the gale, 
And love with us the tinkling team to drive 
O'er peaceful freedom's undivided dale ; 
And we at sober eve would round thee throng, 
Hanging enraptured on thy stately song, 
And greet with smiles the young-eyed poesy 
All deftly masked as hoar antiquity. . . 
Yet will I love to follow the sweet dream 
Where Susquehannah pours his untamed stream ; 
And on some hill, whose forest-frowning side 
Waves o'er the murmurs of his calmer tide. 
Will raise a solemn cenotaph to thee. 
Sweet harper of time-shrouded minstrelsy." 

It might be hard to prove that the Rowley poems 
had very much to do with giving shape to Coleridge's 
own poetic output. Doubtless, without them, 
^* Christabel," and *'The Ancient Mariner," and 
''The Darke Ladye " would still have been; and yet 
it is possible that they might not have been just what 
they are. In ''The Ancient Mariner" there is the 
ballad strain of the "Reliques," but plus something of 
Chatterton's. In such lines as these: 

" The bride hath paced into the hall, 
Red as a rose is she : 
Nodding their heads before her, goes 
The merry minstrelsy; " 



or as these: 



" The wedding guest here beat his breast, 
For he heard the loud bassoon : " 



370 c^ History of English Romanticism. 

one catches a far-away reverberation from certain 
stanzas of *' The Bristowe Tragedie: " this, e, g., 

" Before him went the council-men 
In scarlet robes and gold, 
And tassels spangling in the sun, 
Much glorious to behold ; " 

and this: 

"In diflFerent parts a godly psalm 
Most sweetly they did chant : 
Behind their backs six minstrels came, 
Who tuned the strung bataunt. " * 

Among all the young poets of the generation that 
succeeded Chatterton, there was a tender feeling of 
comradeship with the proud and passionate boy, and 
a longing to admit him of their crew. Byron, indeed, 
said that he was insane; but Shelley, in *'Adonais," 
classes him with Keats among *' the inheritors of unful- 
filled renown." Lord Houghton testifies that Keats 
had a prescient sympathy with Chatterton in his early 
death. He dedicated " Endymion " to his memory. 
In his epistle *' To George Felton Mathew," he asks 
him to help him find a place 

** Where we may soft humanity put on, 
And sit, and rhyme, and think on Chatterton." f 

Keats said that he always associated the season of 
autumn with the memory of Chatterton. He asserted, 

* Rowleian : there is no such instrument known unto men. The 
romantic love of color is observable in this poem, and is strong every- 
where in Chatterton. 

f See also the sonnet : ** O Chatterton, how very sad thy fate " — 
given in Lord Houghton's memoir. * ' Life and Letters of John 
Keats": By R. Monckton Milnes, p. 20 (American Edition, 
New York, 1848). 



'Thomas Chatter ton. 371 

somewhat oddly, that he was the purest writer in the 
English language and used *' no French idiom or parti- 
cles, like Chaucer." In a letter from Jane Porter to 
Keats about the reviews of his *' Endymion," she wrote: 
** Had Chatterton possessed sufficient manliness of 
mind to know the magnanimity of patience, and been 
aware that great talents have a commission from 
Heaven, he would not have deserted his post, and his 
name might have been paged with Milton." 

Keats was the poetic child of Spenser, but some 
traits of manner — hard to define, though not to feel — 
he inherited from Chatterton. In his unfinished 
poem, ''The Eve of St. Mark," there is a Rowleian 
accent in the passage imitative of early English, and 
in the loving description of the old volume of saints' 
legends whence it is taken, with its 

" — pious poesies 
Written in smallest crow-quill size 
Beneath the text." 

And we cannot but think of the shadow of St. Mary 
Redcliffe falling across another young life, as we 
read how 

" Bertha was a maiden fair 
Dwelling in th' old Minster-square ; 
From her fireside she could see, 
Sidelong, its rich antiquity, 
Far as the Bishop's garden-wall " ; 

and of the footfalls that pass the echoing minster-gate, 
and of the clamorous daws that fall asleep in the 
ancient belfry to the sound of the drowsy chimes. 
Rossetti, in so many ways a continuator of Keats* 
artistry, devoted to Chatterton the first of his sonnet- 



372 t/^ History of English Romanticism. 

group, "Five English Poets,"* of which the sestet 
runs thus: 

" Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton ; 
The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace 
Up Redcliffe's spire ; and in the world's armed space 

Thy gallant sword-play: — these to many an one 

Are sweet for ever ; as thy grave unknown 
And love-dream of thine unrecorded face." 

The story of Chatterton's life found its way into 
fiction and upon the stage, f Alfred de Vigny, one of 
the French romanticists, translator of "Othello "and 
"The Merchant of Venice," introduced it as an epi- 
sode into his romance, " Stello ou les Diables Bleus," 
afterward dramatized as "Chatterton," and first played 
at Paris on February 12, 1835, with great success. De 
Vigny made a love tragedy out of it, inventing a 
sweetheart for his hero, in the person of Kitty Bell, 
a role which became one of Madame Dorval's chief 
triumphs. On the occasion of the revival of De Vigny's 
drama in December, 1857, Theophile Gautier gave, 
in the Moniteur, some reminiscences of its first per- 
formance, twenty-two years before. 

" The parterre before which Chatterton declaimed 
was full of pale, long-haired youths, who firmly be- 
lieved that there was no other worthy occupation on 
earth but the making of verses or of pictures — art, as 
they called it; and who looked upon the bourgeois 
with a disdain to which the disdain of the Heidelberg 
or Jena * fox ' for the 'philistine ' hardly approaches. . . 

♦Chatterton, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley. "The absolutely 
miraculous Chatterton," Rossetti elsewhere styles him. 
\ ** Histoire du Romantisrae," pp. 153-54. 



TbG?nas Chatter ton. 373 

As to money, no one thought of it. More than one, 
as in that assembly of impossible professions which 
Theodore de Banville describes with so resigned an 
irony, could have cried without falsehood * I am a 
lyric poet and I live by my profession.' One who has 
not passed through that mad, ardent, over-excited 
but generous epoch, cannot imagine to what a forget- 
fulness of material existence the intoxication, or, if 
you prefer, infatuation of art pushed the obscure and 
fragile victims who would rather have died than 
renounce their dream. One actually heard in the 
night the crack of solitary pistols. Judge of the 
effect produced in such an environment by M. Alfred 
Vigny's * Chatterton '; to which, if you would com- 
prehend it, you must restore the contemporary atmos- 
phere." * 

* " Cliatterton," a drama by Jones and Herman, was played at the 
Princess' Theater, London, May 22, 1884. 



CHAPTER XI. 
Zbc ©crman Q;ributari?. 

Up to the last decade of the eighteenth century the 
romantic movement in Great Britain had been self- 
developed and independent of foreign influence, except 
for such stimulus as it had found, once ane again, in 
the writings of continental scholars like Sanite Palaye 
and Mallet. But now the English literary current 
began to receive a tributary stream from abroad. A 
change had taken place in the attitude of the German 
mind which corresponds quite closely to that whose 
successive steps we have been following. In Ger- 
many, French classicism had got an even firmer hold 
than in England. It is well-known that Frederick the 
Great (1740-86) regarded his mother-tongue as a bar- 
barous dialect, hardly fit for literary use. In his own 
writings, prose and verse, he invariably employed 
French; and he boasted to Gottsched that from his 
youth up he had not read a German book.* 

But already before the middle of the century, and 
just about the time of the publication of Thomson's 
''Seasons," the so-called Swiss school, under the 
leadership of the Ziiricher, Johann Jacob Bodmer, had 
begun a national movement and an attack upon Gallic 
influences. Bodmer fought under Milton's banner, 

* Scherer's " History of German Literature," Conybeare's Transla- 
tion, Vol. II. p. 26. 



The German Tributary, 375 

and in the preface to his prose translation of " Para- 
dise Lost " (1732), he praised Shakspere as the English 
Sophocles. In his **Abhandlung von dem Wunder- 
baren " ("Treatise on the Marvelous," 1740) he 
asserted the claims of freedom, nature, and the inspired 
imagination against the rules of French critics, very- 
much as the Wartons and Bishop Hurd did a few years 
later in England. Deutscheit^ Volkspoesie^ the German 
past, the old Teutonic hero-age, with the Kaiserzeit 
and the Middle Ages in general, soon came into 
fashion. **As early as 1748 Bodmer had published 
specimens from the Minnesingers, in 1757 he had 
brought out a part of the Nibelungenlied, in 1758 and 
1759 a more complete collection of the Minnesingers, 
and till 1781, till just before his death, he continued 
to produce editions of the Middle High-German 
poems. Another Swiss writer, Christian Heinrich 
Myller, a pupil of Bodmer's . . . published in 1784 
and 1785 the whole of the Nibelungenlied and the 
most important of the chivalrous epics. Lessing, in 
his preface to Gleim's * War-songs,' called attention 
to the Middle High-German poets, of whom he con- 
tinued to be throughout his life an ardent admirer. 
Justus Moser took great interest in the Minnesingers. 
About the time when *Gotz' appeared, this enthu- 
siasm for early German poetry was at its strongest, 
and Burger, Voss, Miller, and Holtz wrote Minne- 
songs, in which they imitated the old German lyric 
poets. In 1773 Gleim published 'Poems after the 
Minnesingers,' and in 1779 * Poems after Walther von 
der Vogelweide.' Some enthusiasts had already 
hailed the Nibelungenlied as the German IHad, 
and Biirger, who vied hard with the rest, but without 



37^ z/l History of English ^manticism. 

much success, in turning Homer into German, insisted 
on dressing up the Greek heroes a little in the 
Nibelungen style. He and a few other poets loved to 
give their ballads a chivalrous character. Fritz Stol- 
berg wrote the beautiful song of a German boy, 
beginning, *Mein Arm wird stark und gross mein 
Muth, gib, Vater, mir ein Schwert'; and the song of 
the old Swabian knight — * Sohn, da hast du meinen 
Speer; meinem Arm wird er zu schwer.' Lessing's 
* Nathan,' too, appealed to this enthusiasm for the 
times of chivalry, and must have strengthened the 
feeling. An historian like the Swiss, Johannes 
Miiller, began to show the Middle Ages in a fairer 
light, and even to ascribe great merits to the Papacy. 
But in doing so, Johannes Miiller was only following 
in Herder's steps. Herder . . . had written against 
the self-conceit of his age, its pride in its enlighten- 
ment and achievements. He found in the Middle 
Ages the realization of his aesthetic ideas, namely, 
strong emotion, stirring life and action, everything 
guided by feeling and instinct, not by morbid thought : 
religious ardor and chivalrous honor, boldness in love 
and strong patriotic feeling." * 

When the founders of a truly national literature in 
^rermany cut loose from French moorings, they had 
tn English pilot aboard; and in the translations from 
German romances, dramas, and ballads that were 
made by Scott, Coleridge, Taylor, Lewis, and others, 
English literature was merely taking back with usury 
what it had lent its younger sister. Mention has 
already been made of Burger's and Herder's render- 
ings from Percy's '* Reliques," f an edition of which 

*Scherer, Vol. II. pp. 123-24. f See ante, pp. 300-301. 



The German Tributary. 377 

was published at Gottingen in 1767; as well as of the 
strong excitement aroused in Germany by MacPher- 
son's **Ossian."* This last found — besides the 
Viennese Denis — another translator in Fritz Stol- 
berg, who carried his mediaevalism so far as to join 
the Roman Catholic Church in 1800. Klopstock's 
" Kriegslied," written as early as 1749, was in the 
meter of *' Chevy Chase," which Klopstock knew 
through Addison's Spectator papers. Through Mallet, 
the Eddaic literature made an impression in Germany 
as in England; and Gersternberg's *'Gedicht eines 
Skalden" (1766), one of the first-fruits of the German 
translation of the " Histoire de Dannemarc," preceded 
by two years the publication — though not the composi- 
tion — of Gray's poems from the Norse. 

But the spirit which wrought most mightily upon the 
new German literature was Shakspere's. During the 
period of French culture there had been practically no 
knowledge of Shakspere in Germany. In 1741 Chris- 
tian von Borck, Prussian ambassador to London, had 
translated ''Julius Caesar." This was followed, a few 
years later, by a version of ''Romeo and Juliet." In 
1762-66 Wieland translated, in whole or in part, 
twenty-two of Shakspere's plays. His translation was 
in prose and has been long superseded by the Tieck- 
Schlegel translation (1797-1801-1810). Goethe first 
made acquaintance with Shakspere, when a student 
at Leipsic, through the detached passages given in 
" Dodd's Beauties of Shakspere." \ He afterward got 

* See ante, pp. 337-38. 

f "The Beauties of Shakspere. Regularly selected from each 
Play. With a general index. Digesting them under proper heads." 
By the Rev. Wm. Dodd, 1752. 



378 ^ History of English Tiomanticism. 

hold of Wieland's translation, and when he went to 
Strassburg he fell under the influence of Herder, who 
inspired him with his own enthusiasm for " Ossian," 
and the Volkslieder, and led him to study Shakspere 
in the original. 

Young Germany fastened upon and appropriated the 
great English dramatist with passionate conviction. 
He became an object of worship, an article of faith. 
The Shakspere cultus dominated the whole Sturm- und 
Drangperoide. The stage domesticated him: the poets 
imitated him; the critics exalted him into the type and 
representative {Urbild) of Germanic art, as opposed 
to and distinguished from the art of the Latin races, 
founded upon a false reproduction of the antique.* It 
was a recognition of the essential kinship between the 
two separated branches of the great Teutonic stock. 
The enthusiastic young patriots of the Gottinger 
Hain^ — who hated everything French and called each 
other by the names of ancient bards, — accustomed 
themselves to the use of Shaksperian phrases in con- 
versation; and on one occasion celebrated the 
dramatist's birthday so uproariously that they were 
pounced upon by the police and spent the night in the 
lockup. In Goethe's circle at Strassburg, which num- 

* " Es war nicht bios die Tiefe der Poesie, welche sie zu Shakespeare 
20g, es war ebenso sehr das sichere Gefiihl, das hier germanische 
Art und Kunst sei." — Hetiner's Geschichte der deutschen Litera- 
^^^■, 3- 3.1' s. 51. " 1st zu sagen, dass die Abwendung von den 
Franzosen zu den stammverwandten Englandern ... in ihrem 
geschichtlichen Ursprung und Wachsthum wesentlich die Auflehnung 
des erstarkten germanischen Volksnaturells gegen die erdriickende 
Uebermacht der romanischen Formenwelt war," etc. — Ibid. s. 47. See 
also, ss, 389-95, for a review of the interpretation of the great 
Shaksperian roles by German actors like Schroder and Fleck. 



The German Tributary. 379 

bered, among others, Lenz, Klinger, and H. L. Wag- 
ner, this Shakspere mania was de rigueur. Lenz, 
particularly, who translated ** Love's Labour's Lost,** 
excelled in whimsical imitations of ** such conceits as 
clownage keeps in play." * Upon his return to Frank- 
fort, Goethe gave a feast in Shakspere's honor at his 
father's house (October 14, 1771), in which healths 
were drunk to the ** Will of all Wills," and the youth- 
ful host delivered an extravagant eulogy. *' The first 
page of Shakspere's that I read," runs a sentence of 
this oration, **made me his own for life, and when I 
was through with the first play, I stood like a man 
born blind, to whom sight has been given by an 
instant's miracle. I had a most living perception of 
the fact that my being had been expanded a whole 
infinitude. Everything was new and strange; my eyes 
ached with the unwonted light." f 

Lessing, in his onslaught upon the French theater 
in his *'Hamburgische Dramaturgic" (1767-69), main- 
tained that there was a much closer agreement between 
Sophocles and Shakspere in the essentials of dramatic 
art than between Sophocles and Racine or Voltaire 
in their mechanical copies of the antique. In their 
own plays, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller all took 
Shakspere as their model. But while beginning with 
imitation, they came in time to work freely in the 

* " Wirhoren einen Nachklang jener frohlichen Unterhaltungen, in 
denen die Freunde sichganz und gar in Shakespear'schen Wendungen 
und Wortwitzen ergingen, in seiner Uebersetzung von Shakespeare's 
' Love's Labour's Lost.' " — Hettner, s. 244. 

f See the whole oration (in Hettner, s. 120,) which gives a most 
vivid expression of the impact of Shakspere upon the newly aroused 
mind of Germany. 



380 cyf History of English '^manticism. 

spirit of Shakspere rather than in his manner. Thus 
the first draught of Goethe's '' Gotz von Berlichingen " 
conforms in all externals to the pattern of a Shaks- 
perian *' history." The unity of action went over- 
board along with those of time and place; the scene 
was shifted for a monologue of three lines or a 
dialogue of six; tragic and comic were interwoven; 
the stage was thronged with a motley variety of 
figures, humors, and conditions — knights, citizens, 
soldiers, horse-boys, peasants; there was a court- 
jester; songs and lyric passages were interspersed; 
there were puns, broad jokes, rant, Elizabethan 
metaphors, and swollen trunk-hose hyperboles, with 
innumerable Shakesperian reminiscences in detail. 
But the advice of Herder, to whom he sent his manu- 
script, and the example of Lessing, whose " Emilia 
Galotti"had just appeared, persuaded Goethe to recast 
the piece and give it a more independent form. 

Scherer* says that the pronunciamento of the new 
national movement in German letters was the ** small, 
badly printed anonymous book" entitled *'Von 
Deutscher Art und Kunst, einige fliegende Blatter " 
("Some Loose Leaves about German Style and Art "), 
which appeared in 1773 and contained essays by 
Justus Moser, who "upheld the liberty of the ancient 
Germans as a vanished ideal"; by Johann Gottfried 
Herder, who "celebrated the merits of popular song, 
advocated a collection of the German Volkslieder, 
extolled the greatness of Shakspere, and prophesied 
the advent of a German Shakspere"; and Johann 
Wolfgang Goethe, who praised the Strassburg Minster 

* " German Literature," Vol. II. pp. 82-83. 



The German Tributary, 381 

and Gothic architecture* in general, and ** asserted 
that art, to be true, must be characteristic. The 
reform, or revolution, which this little volume 
announced was connected with hostility to France, 
and with a friendly attitude toward England. . . 
This great movement was, in fact, a revulsion from the 
spirit of Voltaire to that of Rousseau, from the arti- 
ficiality of society to the simplicity of nature, from 
doubt and rationalism to feeling and faith, from 
a priori notions f to history, from hard and fast 
aesthetic rules to the freedom of genius. Goethe's 
* Gotz ' was the first revolutionary symptom which 
really attracted much attention, but the * Fly-sheets 
on German Style and Art' preceded the publication of 
*■ Gotz,' as a kind of programme or manifesto." Even 
Wieland, the mocking and French-minded, the man of 
consummate talent but shallow genius, the representa- 
tive of the Aufkldru7ig {^Eclaircissement^ Illumination) 
was carried away by this new stream of tendency, and 
saddled his hippogriff for a ride ins alte romantische 
Land. He availed himself of the new ** Library of 
Romance " which Count Tressan began publishing in 
France in 1775, studied Hans Sachs and Hartmann 
von Aue, experimented with Old German meters, and 
enriched his vocabulary from Old German sources. 
He poetized popular fairy tales, chivalry stories, and 
motives from the Arthurian epos, such as ** Gandalin " 
and " Geron der Adeliche " (**Gyron le Courteois "). 

* " Unter all«n Menschen des Achtzehnten Jahrhunderts war 
Goethe wieder der Erste, welcher die lang verachtete Herrlichkeit 
der gothischen Baukunst empfand und erfasste." — Hettner^ 3.3' !•» s. 
1 20. 

\ Construirtes Ideal. 



382 cA History of English 'T^manticism. 

But his best and best-knov/n work in this temper was 
" Oberon " (1780) a rich composite of materials from 
Chaucer, *'A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the 
French romance of " Huon of Bordeaux." * 

From this outUne — necessarily very imperfect and 
largely at second hand — of the course of the German 
romantic movement in the eighteenth century, it will 
nevertheless appear that it ran parallel to the English 
most of the way. In both countries the reaction was 
against the Au/kldnmg, i. <?., against the rationalistic, 
prosaic, skeptical, common-sense spirit of the age, 
represented in England by deistical writers like 
Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Tindal in 
the department of religious and moral philosophy; 
and by writers like Addison, Swift, Prior, and Pope in 
polite letters; and represented most brilliantly in the 
literatures of Europe by Voltaire. In opposition to 
this spirit, an effort was now made to hark back to the 
ages of faith; to recover the point of view which 
created mythology, fairy lore, and popular supersti- 
tions; to believe^ at all hazards, not only in God and the 
immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries 
of these beliefs, in ghosts, elves, demons, and witches. 

In both countries, too, the revolution, as it con- 
cerned form, was a break with French classicism and 
with that part of the native literature which had 
followed academic traditions. Here the insurrection 
was far more violent in Germany than in England, f 

*Scherer, II. 129-31. "Oberon" was englished by William 
Sotheby in 1798. 

f " Vor den classischen Dichtarten fangt mich bald an zu ekeln," 
wrote Burger in 1775. " Charakteristiken ": von Erich Schmidt 
(Berlin, 1886) s. 205. " O, das verv/unschte Wort: Klassisch! " 



7he German Tributary. 383 

partly because Gallic influence had tyrannized there 
more completely and almost to the supplanting of the 
vernacular by the foreign idiom, for literary uses; and 
partly because Germany had nothing to compare with 
the shining and solid achievements of the Queen Anne 
classics in England. It was easy for the new school 
of German poets and critics to brush aside perruques 
like Opitz, Gottsched, and Gellert — authors of the 
fourth or fifth class. But Swift and Congreve, and 
Pope and Fielding, were not thus to be disposed of. 
We have noted the cautious, respectful manner in 
which such innovators as Warton and Percy ventured 
to question Pope's supremacy and to recommend older 
English^ poets to the attention of a polite age; and we 
have seen that Horace Walpole's Gothic enthusiasms 
were not inconsistent with literary prejudices more 
conservative than radical, upon the whole. In Eng- 
land, again, the movement began with imitations of 
Spenser and Milton, and, gradually only, arrived at 
the resuscitation of Chaucer and mediaeval poetry and 
the translation of Bardic and Scaldic remains. But in 
Germany there was no EHzabethan literature to 
mediate between the modern mind and the Middle 
Age, and so the Germans resorted to England and 
Shakspere for this. 

In Germany, as in England, though for different 
reasons, the romantic revival did not culminate until 
the nineteenth century, until the appearance of the 

exclaims Herder. " Diesis Wort war es, das alle wahre Bildung nach 
den Alten als noch lebenden Mustern verdrangte. . . Dies Wort 
hat manches Genie unter einen Schutt von Worten vergraben. . . 
Es hat dem Vaterland bluhende Fruchtbaume entzogen!" — Hettner 
3- 3. I. s. 50. 



\ 



384 c^ History of English %omanticism. 

Romantische Schule in the stricter sense — of Tieck, 
Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Wackenroder, Fouque, 
/.Von Arnim, Brentano, and Uhland.' In England 
this v/as owing less to arrested development than 
to the absence of genius. There the forerunners of 
Scott, Coleridge, and Keats were writers of a distinctly 
inferior order: Akenside, Shenstone, Dyer, the War- 
tons, Percy, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, ''Monk'* 
Lewis, the boy Chatterton. If a few rise above this 
level, like Thomson, Collins, and Gray, the slenderness 
of their performance, and the somewhat casual nature 
of their participation in the movement, diminish their 
relative importance. Gray's purely romantic work 
belongs to the last years of his life. Collins' derange- 
ment and early death stopped the unfolding of many 
buds of promise in this rarely endowed lyrist. Thom- 
son, perhaps, came too early to reach any more 
advanced stage of evolution than Spenserism. In 
Germany, on the contrary, the pioneers were men of 
the highest intellectual stature, Lessing, Herder, 
Goethe, Schiller. But there the movement was 
checked for a time by counter-currents, or lost in 
broader tides of literary life. English romanticism 
was but one among many contemporary tendencies: 
sentimentalism, naturalism, realism. German ro- 
manticism was simply an incident of the Sturm- und 
Drangperiode^ which was itself but a temporary phase of 
the swift and many-sided unfolding of the German mind 
in the latter half of the last century; one element in 
the great intellectual ferment which threw off, among 
other products, the Kantian philosophy, the ''Lao- 
coon," "Faust," and " Wilhelm Meister " ; Winckel- 
mann's " Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums " and 



The German Tributary. 385 

Schiller's ^' Wallenstein " and 'MVilhelm Tell." Men 
like Goethe and Schiller were too broad in their 
culture, too versatile in their talents, too multifarious 
in their mental activities and sympathies to be classi- 
fied with a school. The temper which engendered 
''Gotz" and ** Die Rauber " was only a moment in 
the history of their Entwickelung; they passed on 
presently into other regions of thought and art. 

In Goethe especially there ensued, after the time 
of his Italienische Reise^ a reversion to the classic; 
not the exploded pseudo-classic of the eighteenth- 
century brand, but the true Hellenic spirit which 
expressed itself in such work as ''Iphigenie auf 
Tauris," ** Hermann und Dorothea," and the ** Schone 
Helena" and *' Classische Walpurgis-Nacht " episodes 
in !he second part of ** Faust." *' In his youth," says 
Scherer, ''a love for the historical past of Germany 
had seized on the minds of many. Imaginative 
writers filled the old Teutonic forests with Bards and 
Druids and cherished an enthusiastic admiration for 
Gothic cathedrals and for the knights of the Middle 
Ages and of the sixteenth century. . . In Goethe's 
mature years, on the contrary, the interest in classical 
antiquity dwarfed all other aesthetic interests, and 
Germany and Europe were flooded by the classical 
fashion for which Winckelmann had given the first 
strong impulse. The churches became ancient tem- 
ples, the mechanical arts strove after classical forms, 
and ladies affected the dress and manners of Greek 
women. The leaders of German poetry, Goethe 
and Schiller, both attained the summit of their art in 
the imitation of classical models." * Still the ground 

* " German Literature," Vol. II. p. 230. 



386 cA History of English Romanticism. 

recovered from the Middle Age was never again 
entirely lost; and in spite of this classical preposses- 
sion, Goethe and Schiller, even in the last years of the 
century, vied with one another in the composition of 
romantic ballads, like the former's *' Der Erlkonig," 
" Der Fischer," '' Der Todtentanz," and '' Der Zauber- 
lehrling," and the latter's ** Ritter Toggenburg," *' Der 
Kampf mit dem Drachen," and " Der Gang nach dem 
Eisenhammer." 

On comparing the works of a romantic temper pro- 
duced in England and in Germany during the last 
century, one soon becomes aware that, though the 
original impulse was communicated from England, 
the continental movement had greater momentum. 
The Grilndlichkeity the depth and thoroughness of 
the German mind, impels it to base itself in the fine 
arts, as in politics and religion, on foundation prin- 
ciples; to construct for its practice a theoria, an 
cEsthetik. In the later history of German romanticism, 
the mediaeval revival in letters and art was carried out 
with a philosophic consistency into other domains of 
thought and made accessory to reactionary statecraft 
and theology, to Junkerism and Catholicism. Mean- 
while, though the literary movement in Germany in 
the eighteenth century did not quite come to a head, 
it was more critical, learned, and conscious of its own 
purposes and methods than the kindred movement in 
England. The English mind, in the act of creation, 
works practically and instinctively. It seldom seeks 
to bring questions of taste or art under the domain of 
scientific laws. During the classical period it had 
accepted its standards of taste from France, and when 
it broke away from these, it did so upon impulse and 



The German Tributary. 387 

gave either no reasons, or very superficial ones, for its 
new departure. The elegant dissertations of Hurd 
and Percy, and the Wartons, seem very dilettantish 
when set beside the imposing systems of aesthetics 
propounded by Kant, Fichte, and Schelling; or beside 
thorough-going Abhandlungen like the *'Laocoon," 
the *' Hamburgische Dramaturgic," Schiller's treatise 
*'Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung," or 
the analysis of Hamlet's character in "Wilhelm 
Meister." There was no criticism of this kind in 
England before Coleridge; no Shakspere criticism, 
in particular, to compare with the papers on that 
subject by Lessing, Herder, Gerstenberg, Lenz, 
Goethe, and many other Germans. The only eight- 
eenth-century Englishman who would have been 
capable of such was Gray. He had the requisite taste 
and scholarship, but even he wanted the philosophic 
breadth and depth for a fundamental and eingehend 
treatment of underlying principles. 

Yet even in this critical department, German literary 
historians credit England with the initiative. Hett- 
ner * mentions three English critics, in particular, as 
predecessors of Herder in awakening interest in 
popular poetry. These were Edward Young, the 
author of ** Night Thoughts," whose ** Conjectures 
on Original Composition" was published in 1759: 
Robert Wood, whose '' Essay on the Original Genius 
and Writings of Homer" (1768) was translated into 
German, French, Spanish, and Italian; and Robert 
Lowth, Bishop of Oxford, who as Professor of Poetry 
at Oxford delivered there in 1753 his " Praelectiones 
de Sacra Poesi Hebrseorum," translated into English 
* " Literaturgeschichte," 3.3. i. s. 30-31. 



388 iA History of English 'Romanticism. 

and German in 1793. The significance of Young's 
brilliant little essay, which was in form a letter ad- 
dressed to the author of " Sir Charles Grandison," lay- 
in its assertion of the superiority of genius to learning 
and of the right of genius to be free from rules and 
authorities. It was a sort of literary declaration of 
independence; and it asked, in substance, the ques- 
tion asked in Emerson's ** Nature " : "Why should not 
we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" 
Pope had said, in his '* Essay on Criticism," * " follow 
Nature," and in order to follow Nature, learn the rules 
and study the ancients, particularly^ Homer. ** Nature 
and Homer were the same." Contrariwise, Young^ 
says: ** The less we copy the renowned ancients, we 
shall resemble them the more. . . Learning . . . 
is a great lover of rules and boaster of famed ex- 
amples . . . and sets rigid bounds to that liberty to 
which genius often owes its supreme glory. . . Born 
originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies? . . 
Let not great examples or authorities browbeat thy 
reason into too great a diffidence of thyself. . . 
While the true genius is crossing all public roads into 
fresh untrodden ground; he [the imitative writer], up 
to the knees in antiquity, is treading the sacred foot- 
steps of great examples with the blind veneration of a 
bigot saluting the sacred toe." Young asserts that 
Shakspere is equal in greatness to the ancients: 
regrets that Pope did not employ blank verse in his. 
translation of Homer, and calls Addison's ** Cato " " aj 
piece of statuary." 

Robert Wood, who visited and described the ruins of 
Balbec and Palmyra, took his Iliad to the Troad and 

* See ante, p. 48. 



The German Tributary. 389 

read it on the spot. He sailed in the track of Mene- 
laus and the wandering Ulysses; and his acquaintance 
with Eastern scenery and life helped to substitute a 
fresher apprehension of Homer for the somewhat con- 
ventional conception that had prevailed through the 
classical period. What most forcibly struck Herder 
and Goethe in Wood's essay was the emphasis laid 
upon the simple, unlettered, and even barbaric state 
of society in the heroic age: and upon the primitive 
and popular character (Ursprilnglichkeit^ VolkstJiiim- 
lichkeit) of the Homeric poems.* This view of 
Homer, as essentially a minstrel or ballad-maker, has 
been carried so far in Professor Newman's transla- 
tions as to provoke remonstrance from Matthew 
Arnold, who insists upon Homer's ** nobility" and 
*' grand style." f But with whatever exaggeration it 
may have latterly been held, it was wholesomely 
corrective and stimulating when propounded in 
1768. 

Though the final arrival of German romanticism, in 
its fullness, was postponed too late to modify the 
English movement, before the latter had spent its first 
strength, yet the prelude was heard in England and 
found an echo there. In 1792 Walter Scott was a 
young lawyer at Edinburgh and had just attained his 
inajority. 

* " Our polite neighbors the French seem to be most offended at 
certain pictures of primitive simplicity, so unlike those refined modes 
of modern life in which they have taken the lead; and to this we may 
partly impute the rough treatment which our poet received from 
them." — Essay on Homer (JiVihYva. Edition, 1776), p. 127. 

f See Francis W. Newman's " Iliad "(1856) and Arnold's" Lectures 
on Translating Homer " (1861). 



390 ^ History of English %omanticisfn. 

" Romance who loves to nod and sing 
With drowsy head and folded wing, 
To Aim a painted paroquet 
Had been — a most familiar bird — 
Taught him his alphabet to say, 
To lisp his very earliest word." * 

He had lain from infancy " in the lap of legends old," 
and was already learned in the antiquities of the 
Border. For years he had been making his collection 
of memorabilia; claymores, suits of mail, Jedburgh 
axes, border horns, etc. He had begun his annual 
raids into Liddesdale, in search of ballads and folk 
lore, and was filling notebooks with passages from 
the Edda, records of old Scotch law-cases, copies 
of early English poems, notes on the **Morte Dar- 
thur," on the second sight, on fairies and witches; 
extracts from Scottish chronicles, from the Books of 
Adjournal, from Aubrey, and old Glanvil of supersti- 
tious memory; tables of the Moeso-Gothic, Anglo- 
Saxon, and Runic alphabets and transcripts relating 
to the history of the Stuarts. In the autumn or early 
winter of that year, a class of six or seven young men 
was formed at Edinburgh for the study of German, and 
Scott joined it. In his own account of the matter he 
says that interest in German literature was first 
aroused in Scotland by a paper read before the Royal 
Society of Edinburgh in April, 1788, by Henry Mac- 
kenzie, the ** Addison of the North," and author of 
that most sentimental of fictions, **The Man of Feel- 
ing." "The literary persons of Edinburgh were then 
first made aware of the existence of works of genius^ 
in a language cognate with the English, and possessed 

* " Romance," Edgar Poe. 



The German Tributary. 391 

of the same manly force of expression; they learned 
at the same time that the taste which dictated the 
German compositions was of a kind as nearly allied to 
the English as their language; those who were from 
their youth accustomed to admire Shakspere and 
Milton became acquainted for the first time with a 
race of poets who had the same lofty ambition to 
spurn the flaming boundaries of the universe and 
investigate the realms of Chaos and old Night; and 
of dramatists who, disclaiming the pedantry of the 
unities, sought, at the expense of occasional improba- 
bilities and extravagance, to present life on the stage 
in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all its bound- 
less variety of character. . . Their fictitious narra- 
tives, their ballad poetry, and other branches of their 
literature which are particularly apt to bear the stamp 
of the extravagant and the supernatural, began also to 
occupy the attention of the British literati." Scott's 
German studies were much assisted by Alexander 
Frazer Tytler, whose version of Schiller's ** Robbers " 
was one of the earliest English translations from the 
German theater.* 

In the autumn of 1794 Miss Aikin, afterward Mrs. 
Barbauld, entertained a party at Dugald Stewart's 
by reading a translation of Burger's ghastly ballad 
"■ Lenore." The translation was by William Taylor 
of Norwich; it had not yet been published, and Miss 
Aikin read it from a manuscript copy. Scott was not 
present, but his friend Mr. Cranstoun described the 
performance to him; and he was so much impressed 
by his description that he borrowed a volume of Bur- 
ger's poems from his young kinswoman by marriage, 
*" Lockhart's Life of Scott/' Vol. I. p. 163. 



392 ^ History of English Romanticism. 

Mrs. Scott of Harden, a daughter of Count Bruhl of 
Martkirchen, formerly Saxon ambassador at London, 
who had a Scotchwoman for his second wife, the 
dowager Countess of Egremont. Scott set to work in 
1795 to make a translation of the ballad for himself, 
and succeeded so well in pleasing his friends that he 
had a few copies struck off for private circulation in 
the spring of 1796. In the autumn of the same year 
he published his version under the title "William and 
Helen," together with *'The Chase," a translation of 
Biirger's ** Der Wilde Jager." The two poems made 
a thin quarto volume. It v/as printed at Edinburgh, 
was anonymous, and was Walter Scott's first published 
book. Meanwhile Taylor had given his rendering to 
the public in the March number of the Mo7ithly 
Magazine, introducing it with a notice of Burger's 
poems; and the very same year witnessed the appear- 
ance of three other translations, one by J. T. Stanley 
(with copperplate engravings), one by Henry James 
Pye, the poet laureate, and one by the Hon. William 
Robert Spencer,— author of '*Beth Gelert," *' Too 
Late I Stayed," etc., — with designs by Lady Diana 
Beauclerc. (A copy of this last, says AUibone, in 
folio, on vellum, sold at Christie's in 1804 for ^25 4s.) 
A sixth translation, by the Rev. James Beresford, who 
had lived some time in Berlin, came out about 1800; 
and Schlegel and Brandl unite in pronouncing this the 
most faithful, if not the best, English version of the 
ballad.* 

* For full titles and descriptions of these translations, as well as for 
the influence of Burger's poems in England, see Alois Brandl: " Le- 
nore in England," in " Charakteristiken," by Erich Schmidt (Berlin, 
1886) ss. 244-48. Taylor said in 1830 that no German poem had 



The German Tributary, 393 

The poem of which England had taken such mani- 
fold possession, under the varied titles **Lenore," 
*'Leonore," *' Leonora," ''Lenora," "Ellenore," 
"Helen," etc., was indeed a noteworthy one. In 
the original, it remains Biirger's masterpiece, and in 
its various English dresses it gained perhaps as many 
graces as it lost. It was first printed at Gottingen 
in Boie's *'Musen Almanach " in 1773. It was an 
uncanny tale of a soldier of Frederick the Great, 
who had perished in the Seven Years' War, and who 
came at midnight on a spectral steed to claim his lady- 
love and carry her off a thousand miles to the bridal 
bed. She mounts behind him and they ride through 
the phantasms of the night till, at cock-crow, they 
come to a churchyard. The charger vanishes in 
smoke, the lover's armor drops from him, green 
with the damps of the grave, revealing a skeleton 
within, and the maiden finds that her nuptial chamber 

been so often translated: " eight different versions are lying on my 
table and I have read others." He claimed his to be the earliest, as 
written in 1790, though not printed till 1796. " Lenore " won at 
once the honors of parody — surest proof of popularity. Brandl men- 
tions two — " Miss Kitty," Edinburgh, 1797, and "The Hussar of 
Magdeburg, or the Midnight Phaeton," Edinburgh, 1800, and quotes 
Mathias' satirical description of the piece (" Pursuits of Literature," 
1765) as " diablerie tudesque" and a " * Blue Beard' story for the 
nursery." The bibliographies mention a new translation in 1846 by 
Julia M. Cameron, with illustrations by Maclise; and I find a notice 
in Allibone of "The Ballad of Lenore: a Variorum Monograph," 
4to, containing thirty metrical versions in English, announced as 
about to be published at Philadelphia in 1866 by Charles Lulcens. 
^z/^rrcT whether this be the same as Henry Clay Lulcens ("Erratic 
Enrico"), who published "Lean 'Nora" (Philadelphia, 1870; New 
York, 1878), a title suggestive of a humorous intention, but a book 
which I have not seen. 



394 ^ History of English %omanticism. 

is the charnel vault, and her bridegroom is Death. 
"This poem," says Scherer, * 'leaves on us, to some 
degree, the impression of an unsolved mystery; all the 
details are clear, but at the end we have to ask our- 
selves what has really happened; was it a dream of the 
girl, a dream in which she died, or did the ghost really 
appear and carry her away?"* The story is man- 
aged, indeed, with much of that subtle art which Cole- 
ridge used in **The Ancient Mariner" and ** Christa- 
bel "; so that the boundary between the earthly and the 
unearthly becomes indefinite, and the doubt continually 
occurs whether we are listening to a veritable ghost- 
story, or to some finer form of allegory. '* Lenore " 
drew for its materials upon ballad motives common 
to many literatures. It will be sufficient to mention 
** Sweet William's Ghost," as an English example of 
the class. 

Scott's friends assured him that his translation was 
superior to Taylor's, and Taylor himself wrote to him: 
**The ghost nowhere makes his appearance so well 
as with you, or his exit so well as with Mr. Spencer.'* 
But Lewis was right in preferring Taylor's version, 
which has a wildness and quaintness not found in 
Scott's more literal and more polished rendering, and 
is wonderfully successful in catching the Grobheit, the 
rude, rough manner of popular poetry. A few stanzas 
from each will illustrate the difference: 

[From Scott's " William and Helen."] 

" Dost fear? dost fear? The moon shines clear: — 

Dost fear to ride with me ? 
Hurrah! hurrah! the dead can ride " — 

" O William, let them be! " 

* History of German Literature," Vol. II. p. 123. 



The German Tributary. 395 

"See there! see there! What yonder swings 

And creaks 'mid whistling rain ? " 
*• Gibbet and steel, the accursed wheel; 

A murd'rer in his chain. 

*' Halloa! Thou felon, follow here: 

To bridal bed we ride; 
And thou shalt prance a fetter dance 

Before me and ray bride." 

And hurry! hurry! clash, clash, clash! 

The wasted form descends,* 
And fleet as wind through hazel bush 

The wild career attends.* 

Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode, 

Splash, splash! along the sea: 
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood, 

The flashing pebbles flee. 

[From Taylor's "Lenora."] 

Look up, look up, an airy crewe 

In roundel dances reele. 
The moone is bryghte and blue the night, 

May'st dimly see them wheel.f 

•' Come to, come to, ye ghostlie crewe, 

Come to and follow me. 
And daunce for us the wedding daunce 
When we in bed shall be." 

And brush, brush, brush, the ghostlie crew 

Come wheeling o'er their heads, 
All rustling like the withered leaves 

That wyde the whirlwind spreads. 

* These are book phrases, not true ballad diction. 
\ Cf. The "Ancient Mariner": 

" The feast is set, the guests are met, 
May'st hear the merry din." 



39^ <^ History of English %omanticism. 

Halloo! halloo! away they goe 

Unheeding wet or drye, 
And horse and rider snort and blowe, 

And sparkling pebbles flye. 

And all that in the moonshyne lay 

Behynde them fled afar; 
And backward scudded overhead 

The skye and every star. 

Tramp, tramp across the land they speede, 

Splash, splash across the sea: 
" Hurrah! the dead can ride apace, 

Dost fear to ride with me ? " 

It was this last stanza which fascinated Scott, as re- 
peated from memory by Mr. Cranstoun; and he 
retained it without much change in his version. 
There is no mention of the sea in Burger, whose 
hero is killed in the battle of Prague and travels 
only by land. But Taylor nationalized and individual- 
ized the theme by making his William a knight of 
Richard the Lion Heart's, who had fallen in Holy 
Land. Scott followed him and made his a crusader 
in the army of Frederic Barbarossa. Burger's poem 
was written in an eight-lined stanza, but Taylor and 
Scott both chose the common English ballad verse, 
with its folkloreish associations, as the best vehicle 
for reproducing the grewsome substance of the story; 
and Taylor gave an archaic cast to his diction, still 
further to heighten the effect. Lewis considered his 
version a masterpiece of translation, and, indeed, 
"far superior, both in spirit and in harmony, to the 
German." Taylor showed almost equal skill in his 
rendering of Burger's next most popular ballad, " Des 
Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain," first printed in 



The German Tributary, 397 

the Monthly Magazine for April, 1796, under the some- 
what odd title of "The Lass of Fair Wone." 

Taylor of Norwich did more than any man of his 
generation, by his translations and critical papers in 
the Monthly Magazine and Monthly Review^ to spread a 
knowledge of the new German literature in England. 
When a lad of sixteen he had been sent to study at 
Detmold, Westphalia, and had spent more than a year 
(1781-82) in Germany, calling upon Goethe at Weimar, 
with a letter of introduction, on his way home to 
England. ** When his acquaintance with this literature 
began," wrote Lucy Aikin, "there was probably no 
English translation of any German author but through 
the medium of the French, and he is very likely to 
have been the first Englishman of letters to read 
Goethe, Wieland, Lessing, and Burger in the origi- 
nals."* Some years before the publication of his 
"Lenora" he had printed for private distribution 
translations of Lessing's "Nathan der Weise (1791) 
and Goethe's " Iphigenie auf Tauris " (1793)- In 
1829-30 he gathered up his numerous contributions to 
periodicals and put them together in a three-volume 
" Historic Survey of German Poetry," which was 
rather roughly, though not disrespectfully, handled by 
Carlyle in the Ediriburgh Review. Taylor's tastes were 
one-sided, not to say eccentric; he had not kept up 
with the later movement of German thought; his crit- 
ical opinions were out of date, and his book was sadly 
wanting in unity and a proper perspective. Carlyle 
was especially scandalized by the slight space accorded 

* " Memoir of Wm. Taylor of Norwich," by J. W. Robberds 
(1843). Vol. II. p. 573. 



39^ «^ History of English 'T^omanticism, 

to Goethe.* But Taylor's really brilliant talent in 
translation, and his important service as an introducer 
and interpreter of German poetry to his own country- 
men, deserve always to be gratefully remembered. 
** You have made me hunger and thirst after German 
poetry," wrote Southey to him, February 24, 1799.! 

The year 1796, then, marks the confluence of the 
English and German romantic movements. It seems 
a little strange that so healthy a genius as Walter 
Scott should have made his dedu^ in an exhibition of 
the horrible. Lockhart reports him, on the authority 
of Sir Alexander Wood, as reading his "William and 
Helen" over to that gentleman *'in a very slow and 
solemn tone," and then looking at the fire in silence 
and presently exclaiming, ** I wish to Heaven I could 
get a skull and two crossbones. " Whereupon Sir Alex- 
ander accompanied him to the house of John Bell, 
surgeon, where the desired articles were obtained and 
mounted upon the poet's bookcase. During the next 
few years, Scott continued to make translations of 
German ballads, romances, and chivalry dramas. 
These remained for the present in manuscript; and 
some of them, indeed^ such as his versions of Babo's 
** Otto von Wittelsbach " (1796-97) and Meier's " Wol- 
fred von Dromberg" (1797) were never permitted 
to see the light. His second publication (February, 
1799) was a free translation of Goethe's tragedy, ** G<5tz 
von Berlichingen mit der Eisenen Hand. " The original 
was a most influential work in Germany. It had been 
already twenty-six years before the public and had 

* For Taylor's opinion of Carlyle's papers on Goethe in the Foreign 
Review^ see " Historic Survey," Vol. III. pp. 378-79. 
f " Memoir of Taylor," Vol. I. p. 255. 



The German Tributary. 399 

produced countless imitations, with some of which 
Scott had been busy before he encountered this, the 
fountain head of the whole flood of Ritterschau- 
spieU.'^ Gotz was an historical character, a robber 
knight of Franconia in the fifteenth century, who had 
championed the rights of the free knights to carry on 
private warfare and had been put under the ban of 
the empire for engaging in feuds. ** It would be diffi- 
cult," -wrote Carlyle, '*to name two books which have 
exercised a deeper influence on the subsequent litera- 
ture of Europe" — than *'The Sorrows of Werther " 
and *' Gotz." *' The fortune of 'Berlichingen with the 
Iron Hand,' though less sudden" — than Werther's — 
**was by no means less exalted. In his own country 
* Gotz,' though he now stands solitary and childless, 
became the parent of an innumerable progeny of chiv- 
alry plays, feudal delineations, and poetico-antiquarian 
performances; which, though long ago deceased, made 
noise enough in their day and generation; and with 
ourselves his influence has been perhaps still more 
remarkable. Sir AValter Scott's first literary enter- 
prise was a translation of * Gotz von Berlichingen '; 
and if genius could be communicated, like instruction, 
we might call this work of Goethe's the prime cause 
of ' Marmion * and 'The Lady of the Lake,' with 
all that has since followed from the same creative 
hand. . . How far * Gotz von Berlichingen ' actually 
affected Scott's literary destination, and whether with- 

* Among the most notable of these was " Maler " (Friedrich) 
Miiller's " Golo und Genoveva " (written 1781; published 1811); 
Count Torring's "Agnes Bernauerin" (1780); and Jacob Meyer's 
" Sturm von Borberg " (1778), and " Fust von Stromberg " (1782). 
Several of these were very successful on the stage. 



400 t/f History of English Romanticism. 

out it the rhymed romances, and then the prose 
romances of the author of Waverley, would not have 
followed as they did, must remain a very obscure 
question; obscure and not important. Of the fact, 
however, there is no doubt, that these two tendencies, 
which may be named Gotzism and Wertherism, of the 
former of which Scott was representative with us, 
have made and are still in some quarters making the 
tour of all Europe. In Germany, too, there was this 
affectionate, half-regretful looking-back into the past: 
Germany had its buff-belted, watch-tower period in 
literature, and had even got done with it before Scott 
began." * 

Elsewhere Carlyle protests against the common 
English notion that German literature dwells "with 
peculiar complacency among wizards and ruined 
towers, with mailed knights, secret tribunals, monks, 
specters, and banditti. . . If an)^ man will insist on 
taking Heinse's ' Ardinghello * and Miller's ' Sieg- 
wart,' the works of Veit Weber the Younger, and above 
all the everlasting Kotzebue,f as his specimens of Ger- 
man literature, he may establish many things. Black 
Forests and the glories of Lubberland, sensuality and 
horror, the specter nun and the charmed moonshine 
shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws also, with 
huge whiskers and the most cat-o'-mountain aspect; 
tear-stained sentimentalists, the grimmest man-haters, 

* " Essay on Walter Scott." 

f Kotzebue's " The Stranger "(*' Menschenhass und Reue") still 
keeps the English stage. Sheridan's " Pizarro" — a version of 
Kotzebue's " Spaniards in Peru " — was long a favorite; and " Monk " 
Lewis made another translation of the same in 1799, entitled " RoUa," 
which, however, was never acted. 



The German Tributary. 401 

ghosts and the like suspicious characters will be found 
in abundance. We are little read in this bowl-and- 
dagger department; but we do understand it to have 
been at onetime rather diligently cultivated; though 
at present it seems to be mostly relinquished. . . 
What should we think of a German critic that selected 
his specimens of British literature from 'The Castle 
Specter,' Mr. Lewis' * Monk,' or the * Mysteries of 
Udolpho,' and ' Frankenstein, or the Modern Pro- 
metheus '? . . . * Faust,' for instance, passes with 
many of us for a mere tale of sorcery and art magic. 
It would scarcely be more unwise to consider * Ham- 
let ' as depending for its main interest on the ghost 
that walks in it."* 

Now for the works here named, as for the whole 
class of melodramas and melodramatic romances which 
swarmed in Germany during the last quarter of the 
century and made their way into English theaters and 
circulating libraries, in the shape of translations, 
adaptations, imitations, two plays were remotely 
responsible: Goethe's ** Gotz " (1773), with its robber 
knights, secret tribunal, imperialist troopers, gypsies, 
and insurgent peasants; and Schiller's **Die Rauber" 
(1781), with its still more violent situations and more 
formidable dramatis personce. True, this spawn of the 
Sturm- U7id Dratigzeit, with its dealings in banditti, 
monks, inquisitors, confessionals, torture and poison, 
dungeon and rack, the haunted tower, the yelling 
ghost, and the solitary cell, had been anticipated in 
England by Walpole's ''Castle of Otranto," and 
'* Mysterious Mother "; but this slender native stream 
was now quite overwhelmed in the turbid flood of 
* *' State of German Literature." 



402 <iA History of English "Romanticism. 

sensational matter from the Black Forest and the 
Rhine. Mrs. Radcliffe herself had drunk from foreign 
sources. In 1794 she made the tour of the Rhine and 
published a narrative of her journey in the year follow- 
ing. The knightly river had not yet become hack- 
neyed; Brentano had not invented nor Heine sung 
the seductive charms of the Liirlei; nor Byron mused 
upon **the castled crag of Drachenfels." The 
French armies were not far off, and there were 
alarums and excursions all along the border. But the 
fair traveler paused upon many a spot already sacred 
to legend and song: the Mouse Tower and Roland- 
seek and the Seven Mountains. She noted the peas- 
ants, in their picturesque costumes, carrying baskets 
of soil to the steep vineyard terraces: the ruined keeps 
of robber barons on the heights, and the dark sweep 
of the romantic valleys, bringing in their tributary 
streams from north and south. 

Lockhart says that Scott's translation of " Gotz " 
should have been published ten years sooner to have 
had its full effect. For the English public had already 
become sated with the melodramas and romances of 
Kotzebue and the other German Ki-aftmanner ; and 
^the clever parody of "The Robbers," under the title 
of '*The Rovers," which Canning and Ellis had pub- 
lished in the Anti- Jacobin^ had covered the entire 
species with ridicule. The vogue of this class of 
fiction, the chivalry romance, the feudal drama, the 
robber play and robber novel, the monkish tale and 
the ghost story {RitterstUck, Ritterroman^ Rduberstuck^ 
Rduben'omaUy Klostergeschichte^ Gespensterlied) both in 
Germany and England, satisfied, however crudely, the 
longing of the time for freedom, adventure, strong 



The German Tributary. 403 

action, and emotion. As Lowell said of the transcen- 
dental movement in New England, it was a breaking 
of windows to get at the fresh air. Laughable as 
many of them seem to-day, with their improbable plots 
and exaggerated characters, they met a need which 
had not been met either by the rationalizing wits of 
the Augustan age or by the romanticizing poets who 
followed them with their elegiac refinement, and their 
unimpassioned strain of reflection and description. 
They appeared, for the moment, to be the new avatar 
of the tragic muse whereof Akenside and Collins and 
Warton had prophesied, the answer to their demand 
for something wild and primitive, for the return into 
poetry of the Naturton^ and the long-absent pov/er 
of exciting the tragic emotions, pity and terror. 
This spirit infected not merely the department of the 
chivalry play and the Gothic romance, but prose 
fiction in general. It is responsible for morbid and 
fantastic creations like Beckford's "Vathek," God- 
win's "St. Leon" and *' Caleb Williams," Mrs. 
Shelley's ** Frankenstein," Shelley's '* Zastrozzi" and 

St. Irvine the Rosicrucian," and the American 
Charles Brockden Brown's ''Ormond" and " Wie- 
land," forerunners of Hawthorne and Poe; tales of 
sleep-walkers and ventriloquists, of persons who are 
in pursuit of the elixir vitce, or who have committed 
the unpardonable sin, or who manufacture monsters in 
their laboratories, or who walk about in the Halls of 
Eblis, carrying their burning hearts in their hands. 

Lockhart, however, denies that " Gotz von Ber- 
lichingen " had anything in common with the absurdi- 
ties which Canning made fun of in the Anti- Jacobin. 
He says that it was a ''broad, bold, free, and most 



404 t/} History of English Romanticism, 

picturesque delineation of real characters, manners, 
and events." He thinks that in the robber barons 
of the Rhine, with ** their forays upon each other's 
domains, the besieged castles, the plundered herds, the 
captive knights, the brow-beaten bishop and the baffled 
liege-lord," Scott found a likeness to the old life of 
the Scotch border, with its moss-troopers, cattle raids, 
and private warfare; and that, as Percy's ''Reliques" 
prompted the '' Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," so 
'*Gotz" prompted the ** Lay of the Last Minstrel" 
and "Marmion." He quotes the passage from" Gotz '^ 
where Selbiss is borne in, wounded, by two troopers 
who ascend a watch-tower and describe to their leader 
the further progress of the battle; and he asks *' who 
does not recognize in Goethe's drama the true original 
of the death scene in ' Marmion ' and the storm in 
*Ivanhoe' ? " 

A singular figure now comes upon our stage, 
Matthew Gregory Lewis, commonly nicknamed 
^* Monk " Lewis, from the title of his famous romarkce. 
It is a part of the irony of things that so robust a 
muse as Walter Scott's should have been nursed in 
infancy by a little creature like Lewis. His "Monk " 
had been published in 1795, when the author was only 
twenty. In 1798 Scott's friend William Erskine met 
Lewis in London. The latter was collecting materials 
for his " Tales of Wonder," and when Erskine showed 
him Scott's "William and Helen" and "The Wild 
Huntsman," and told him that he had other things of 
the kind in manuscript, Lewis begged that Scott would 
contribute to his collection. Erskine accordingly put 
him in communication with Scott, who felt highly 
flattered by the Monk's request, and wrote to him that 



The German Tributary, 4^5 

his ballads were quite at his service. Lewis replied, 
thanking him for the offer. ** A ghost or a witch," he 
wrote, ** is a sine qua non ingredient in all the dishes 
of which I mean to compose my hobgoblin repast." 
Later in the same year Lewis came to Edinburgh and 
v/as introduced to Scott, who found him an odd con- 
trast to the grewsome horrors of his books, being a 
cheerful, foppish, round-faced little man, a follower of 
fashion and an assiduous tuft-hunter. ** Mat had 
queerish eyes," writes his protege : **they projected 
like those of some insects, and were flattish on the 
orbit. His person was extremely small and boyish — 
he was indeed the least man I ever saw, to be strictly 
well and neatly made. . . This boyishness went 
through life with him. He was a child and a spoiled 
child, but a child of high imagination ; and so he wasted 
himself on ghost stories and German romances. He 
had the finest ear for rhythm I ever met with — finer 
than Byron's." 

Byron, by the way, had always a kindly feeling for 
Lewis, though he laughed at him in ** English Bards 
and Scotch Reviewers" : 

*'0 wonder-working Lewis, Monk or Bard, 

Who fain would'st make Parnassus a churchyard ; 
Lo ! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow ; 
Thy muse a sprite, Apollo's sexton thou ; 
Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand. 
By gibbering spectres hailed, thy kindred band, 
Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page, 
To please the females of our modest age — 
All hail, M. P.,* from whose infernal brain 
Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train ; 

♦Lewis sat in Parliament for Hindon, Wilts, succeeding Beckford 
of " Vathek " and Fonthill Abbey fame. 



4o6 ftA History of English T{pmanticism. 

At whose command grim women throng in crowds, 
And kings of fire, of water and of clouds, 
With ' small gray men,' wild yagers and what not, 
To crown with honor thee and Walter Scott ! " 

In 1816, while on his way to Italy, Lewis sojourned 
for a space with Byron and Shelley in their Swiss 
retreat and set the whole company composing goblin 
stories. The most remarkable outcome of this queer 
symposium was Mrs. Shelley's abnormal romance^ 
''Frankenstein." The signatures of Byron and 
Shelley are affixed, as witnesses, to a codicil to Lewis' 
will, which he drew at this time and dated at Maison 
Diodati, Geneva; a somewhat rhetorical document in 
which he provided for the protection of the slaves on 
his Jamaica plantations. It was two years after this, 
and on his return voyage from a visit to these West 
Indian estates, that Lewis died of yellow fever and 
was buried at sea. Byron made this note of it in his 
diary: 



that is, 



•"I'd give the lands of Deloraine 
Dark Musgrave were alive again/ 



" I would give many a sugar cane 
Monk Lewis were alive again. " 



Scott's moc^esty led him to depreciate his own verses 
as compared with Lewis', some of which he recited to 
Ballantyne, in 1799, speaking of their author, says 
Lockhart, "with rapture." But however fine an ear 
for rhythm Lewis may have had, his verse is for the 
most part execrable; and his jaunty, jigging anap^sts 
and pragmatic manner are ludicrously out of keeping 



The German Tributary. 407 

with the horrors of his tale, increasing the air of 
bathos which distinguishes his poetry: 

" A toad still alive in the liquor she threw, 
And loud shrieked the toad as in pieces it flew: 
And erer, the cauldron as over she bent, 
She muttered strange words of mysterious intent : '* 

or this from the same ballad: * 

" Wild laughing, the Fiend caught the hand from the floor, 
Releasing the babe, kissed the wound, drank the gore ; 
A little jet ring from her finger then drew, 
Thrice shrieked a loud shriek and was borne from their view." 

Lewis would appear to have inherited his romantic 
turn from his mother, a sentimental little dame whose 
youthful looks caused her often to be taken for Mat's 
sister, and whose reading was chiefly confined to 
novels. The poor lady was something of a blue- 
stocking and aspired, herself, to literary honors. 
Lewis* devotion to her is very charming, and the elder- 
brotherly tone of his letters to her highly amusing. 
But he had a dislike of "female authorship"; and 
the rumor having reached his ear that his mother had 
written a novel and a tragedy and was preparing to 
print them, he wrote to her in alarm, begging her to 
stay her hand. **I hold that a woman has no busi- 
ness to be a public character, and that, in proportion 
as she acquires notoriety, she loses delicacy. I always 
consider a female author as a sort of half-man." He 
was also, quite properly, shocked at some gossip 
which attributed ** The Monk," to his mother instead 
of to his mother's son. 

We read in the ''Life and Correspondence of 

* " The Grim White Woman," in " Tales of Wonder." 



4o8 c/^ History of English '^manticism. 

Matthew Gregory Lewis" (2 vols., London, 1839), 
that one of Mrs. Lewis* favorite books was " Glanvil 
on Witches." Glanvil was the seventeenth-century 
writer whose ** Vanity of Dogmatizing,"* and **Sad- 
duceismus Triumphatus " rebuked the doubter and 
furnished arguments for Cotton Mather's *' Wonders 
of the Invisible World " (1693), an apology for 
his share in the Salem witchcraft trials; and whose 
description of a ghostly drum, that was heard to 
beat every night in a Wiltshire country house, gave 
Addison the hint for his comedy of ** The Drummer." 
Young Lewis gloated with a pleasing horror over 
Glanvil's pages and the wonderful copperplates which 
embellished them; particularly the one which repre- 
sents the devil beating his airy tympanum over Mr. 
Mompesson's house. In the ancient mansion of Stan- 
stead Hall, belonging to a kinsman of his father, 
where the boy spent a part of his childhood, there was 
a haunted chamber known as the cedar room. '^ In 
maturer years," says his biographer, ** Lewis has fre- 
quently been heard to declare that at night, when he 
was conducted past that gloomy chamber, on the way 
to his dormitory, he would cast a glance of terror over 
his shoulder, expecting to see the huge and strangely 
carved folding doors fly open and disclose some of 
those fearful shapes that afterward resolved themselves 
into the ghastly machinery of his works." 

Lewis' first and most celebrated publication was 
*'Ambrosio, or the Monk" (1795), a three-volume 
romance of the Gothic type, and a lineal descendant 
of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe. He began it at Oxford 

* Matthew Arnold's lovely "Scholar Gypsy" was suggested by 
a passage in this. 



The German Tributary. 409 

in 1792, describing it in a letter to his mother as "a 
romance in the style of 'The Castle of Otranto.' " 
But in the summer of the same year he went to Ger- 
many and took up his residence at Weimar, where he 
was introduced to Goethe and made eager acquaintance 
with the bizarre productions of the Sturfn- und Drang- 
periode. For years Lewis was one of the most active 
intermediaries between the German purveyors of the 
terrible and the English literary market. He fed 
the stage with melodramas and operas, and stuffed 
the closet reader with ballads and prose romances.* 
Meanwhile, being at The Hague in the summer of 1794, 
he resumed and finished his "Monk," in ten weeks. 
*'Iwas induced to go on with it," he wrote to his 
mother, ** by reading the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' 
which is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting 
books that has ever been published. . . When you 
read it, tell me whether you think there is any resem- 
blance between the character given of Montoni . . . 
and my own. I confess that it struck me." This 
innocent vanity of fancying a likeness between Anne 
Radcliffe's dark-browed villain and his own cherubic 

* The following is a list of his principal translations: "The 
Minister" (1797), from Schiller's " Kabale und Liebe " ; played at 
Covent Garden in 1803, as "The Harper's Daughter." " RoUa " 
(1799), from Kotzebue's " Spaniards in Peru." *' Adelmorn, or the 
Outlaw" (1800), played at Drury Lane, 1801. " Tales of Terror" 
(iSoi) and "Tales of Wonder" (1801). (There seems to be some 
doubt as to the existence of the alleged Kelso editions of these in 
1799 and 1800, respectively. See article on Lewis in the "Diet. 
Nat. Biog.") "The Bravo of Venice" (1804), a prose romance, 
dramatized and played at Covent Garden, as " Rugantino," in 1805. 
"Feudal Tyrants" (1807), a four-volume romance. "Romantic 
Tales" (1808), 4 vols, from German and French. 



410 t^ History of English Romanticism. 

personality recalls Scott's story about the picture of 
Lewis, by Saunders, which was handed round at 
Dalkeith House. '' The artist had ingeniously flung a 
dark folding-mantle around the form, under which was 
half-hid a dagger, a dark lantern, or some cut-throat 
appurtenance; with all this, the features were pre- 
served and ennobled. It passed from hand to hand 
into that of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who, hearing 
the general voice affirm that it was very like, said 
aloud, * Like Mat Lewis! Why, that picture's like a 
man.'" "The Monk" used, and abused, the now 
familiar apparatus of Gothic romance. It had Span- 
ish grandees, heroines of dazzling beauty, bravoes 
and forest banditti, foolish duennas and gabbling 
domestics, monks, nuns, inquisitors, magic mirrors, 
enchanted wands, midnight incantations, sorcerers, 
ghosts, demons; haunted chambers, wainscoated in 
dark oak; moonlit castles with ruined towers and 
ivied battlements, whose galleries rang with the 
shrieks and blasphemies of guilty spirits, and from 
whose portals issued, when the castle clock tolled 
one, the specter of a bleeding nun, with dagger and 
lamp in hand. There were poisonings, stabbings, and 
ministrations of sleeping potions; beauties who 
masqueraded as pages, and pages who masqueraded 
as wandering harpers; secret springs that gave 
admittance to winding stairs leading down into the 
charnel vaults of convents, where erring sisters were 
immured by cruel prioresses and fed on bread and 
water among the loathsome relics of the dead. 

With all this, "The Monk" is a not wholly con- 
temptible work. There is a certain narrative power 
about it which puts it much above the level of "The 



The German Tributary, 411 

Castle of Otranto." And though it partakes of the 
stilted dialogue and false conception of character 
that abound in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, it has 
neither the excess of scenery nor of sentiment which 
distinguishes that very prolix narrator. There is 
nothing strictly mediaeval about it. The knight in 
armor cuts no figure and the historical period is not 
precisely indicated. But the ecclesiastical features 
lend it a semblance of mediaevalism; and one is 
reminded, though but faintly, by the imprisonment 
of the offending sister in the sepulcher of the con- 
vent, of the scene in **Marmion" where Constance 
is immured in the vaults of Lindisfarne — a frank 
anachronism, of course, on Scott's part, since Lindis- 
farne had been in ruins centuries before the battle 
of Flodden. The motto from Horace on the title 
page of "The Monk" sums up its contents, and 
indeed the contents of most of its author's writings, 
prose and verse — 

" Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas, 
Nocturnos lemures portentaque. 

The hero Ambrosio is the abbot of St. Francis* 
Capuchin monastery in Madrid; a man of rigid 
austerity, whose spiritual pride makes him an easy 
prey to the temptations of a female demon, who leads 
him by degrees through a series of crimes, including 
incest and parricide, until he finally sells his soul to the 
devil to escape from the dungeons of the Inquisition 
and the atito da fe^ subscribing the agreement, in 
approved fashion, upon a parchment scroll with an iron 
pen dipped in blood from his own veins. The fiend, 
who enters with thunder and lightning, over whose 



412 c/f History of English %omanlicism. 

shoulders ** waved two enormous sable wings," and 
whose hair "was supplied by living snakes," then 
snatches up his victim and soars with him to a peak 
of the Sierra Morena, where in a Salvator Rosa land- 
scape of torrents, cliffs, caverns, and pine forests, by 
the light of an opera moon, and to the sound of the 
night wind sighing hoarsely and **the shrill cry of 
mountain eagles," he drops him over a precipice and 
makes an end of him. 

A passage from the episode of Agnes de Medina, the 
incarcerated nun, will illustrate Lewis' wonder-work- 
ing arts : " A faint glimmering of light which strained 
through the bars permitted me to distinguish the sur- 
rounding horrors. I was oppressed by a noisome, 
suffocating smell; and perceiving that the grated door 
was unfastened, I thought that I might possibly effect 
my escape. As I raised myself with this design, my 
hand rested upon something soft. I grasped it and 
advanced it toward the light. Almighty God! what 
was my disgust! my consternation! In spite of its 
putridity and the worms which preyed upon it, I per- 
ceived a corrupted human head, and recognized the 
features of a nun who had died some months before. 
. . A sepulchral lamp was suspended from the roof 
by an iron chain and shed a gloomy light through the 
dungeon. Emblems of death were seen on every side; 
skulls, shoulder-blades, thigh-bones and other relics 
of mortality were scattered upon the dewy ground. 
. . As I shrunk from the cutting wind which howled 
through my subterraneous dwelling, the change seemed 
so striking, so abrupt, that I doubted its reality. . . 
Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pam- 
pered with the poisonous vapors of the dungeon, 



The German Tributary. 4^3 

dragging his loathsome length along my bosom; some- 
times the quick, cold lizard roused me, leaving his 
slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself in the 
tresses of my wild and matted hair. Often have I, at 
waking, found my fingers ringed with the long worms 
which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant." 

" The Monk " won for its author an immediate and 
wide celebrity, assisted no doubt by the outcry against 
its immorality. Lewis tried to defend himself by 
pleading that the outline and moral of his story were 
borrowed from *'The History of Santon Barsisa " in 
the Guardian (No. 148). But the voluptuous nature 
of some of the descriptions induced the Attorney 
General to enjoin the sale of the book, and Lewis 
bowed to public opinion so far as to suppress the ob- 
jectionable passages in later editions. Lewis' melo- 
drama **The Castle Specter " was first performed 
December 14, 1797, at Drury Lane, ran sixty nights 
and ''continued popular as an acting play," says the 
biographer, " up to a very recent period." * This is 
strong testimony to the contemporary appetite for 
nightmare, for the play is a trumpery affair. Sheridan, 
who had a poor opinion of it, advised the dramatist to 
keep the specter out of the last scene. *' It had been 
said," explains Lewis in his preface, **that if Mr. 
Sheridan had not advised me to content myself with a 
single specter, I meant to have exhibited a whole 
regiment of ghosts." The prologue, spoken by 
Mr. Wroughton, invokes **the fair enchantress, Ro- 
mance ": 

*' The moonstruck child of genius and of woe," 
* The printed play had reached its eleventh edition in 1803. 



414 c/^ History of English "T^manticism. 

who 

" — Loathes the sun or blazing taper's light ; 
The moonbeamed landscape and tempestuous night 
Alone she loves ; and oft with glimmering lamp 
Near graves new opened, or midst dungeons damp, 
Drear forests, ruined aisles and haunted towers, 
Forlorn she roves and raves away the hours." 

The scene of the drama is Conway Castle in Wales, 
where abides Earl Osmond, a feudal tyrant of the 
''Otranto" type, who is planning an incestuous mar- 
riage with his own niece, concerning which he thus 
soliloquizes: **What though she prefer a basilisk's 
kiss to mine? Because my short-lived joy may cause 
her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those pleasures sought 
so long, desired so earnestly? That will I not, by 
Heaven! Mine she is, and mine she shall be, though 
Reginald's bleeding ghost flit before me and thunder 
in my ear 'Hold! Hold!' — Peace, stormy heart, she 
comes." Reginald's ghost does not flit, because Regi- 
nald is still in the flesh, though not in very much 
flesh. He is Osmond's brother and Angela's father, 
and the wicked Earl thought that he had murdered 
him. It turns out, however, that, though left for dead, 
he has recovered of his hurts and has been kept unbe- 
known in solitary confinement, in a dungeon vault 
under the castle, for the somewhat long period of six- 
teen years. He is discovered in Act V., "emaciated, 
in coarse garments, his hair hanging wildly about his 
face, and a chain bound round his body." 

Reginald's ghost does not flit, but Evelina's does. 
Evelina is Reginald's murdered wife, and her specter 
in "white and flowing garments, spotted with blood," 
appears to Angela in the oratory communicating with 



The German Tributary, 415 

the cedar room, which is furnished with an antique 
bedstead and the portrait of a lady on a sliding 
panel. In truth, the castle is uncommonly well sup- 
plied with apparitions. Earl Herbert rides around it 
every night on a white horse; Lady Bertha haunts the 
west pinnacle of the chapel tower; and Lord Hilde- 
brand may be seen any midnight in the great hall, 
playing football with his own head. So says Motley 
the jester, who affords the comedy element of the 
play, with the help of a fat friar who guzzles sack and 
stuffs venison pasties, and a soubrette after the 
*' Otranto " pattern. 

A few poems were scattered through the pages of 
*'The Monk," including a ballad from the Danish, and 
another from the Spanish. But the most famous of 
these was "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imo- 
gene," original with Lewis, though evidently suggested 
by **Lenore." It tells how a lover who had gone to 
Palestine presented himself at the bridal feast of his 
faithless fair one, just as the clock struck one and the 
lights burned blue. At the request of the company, 
the strange knight raises his visor and discloses a 
skeleton head: 

" All present then uttered a terrified shout ; 
All turned with disgust from the scene ; 
The worms they crept in and the worms they crept out, 
And sported his eyes and his temples about 
While the spectre addressed Imogene." 

He winds his arms about her and sinks with his prey 
through the yawning ground; and 

** At midnight four times in each year does her sprite, 
When mortals in slumber are bound, 



4i6 c/f History of English Romanticism, 

Arrayed in her bridal apparel of white, 
Appear in the hall with a skeleton knight 
And shriek as he whirls her around. 

" While they drink out of skulls newly torn from the grave. 
Dancing round them pale spectres are seen. 
Their liquor is blood, and this horrible stave 
They howl : ' To the health of Alonzo the Brave 
And his consort, the Fair Imogene ! ' " 

Lewis' own contributions to his ** Tales of Terror " and 
** Tales of Wonder," were of this same raw-head and 
bloody-bones variety. His imagination rioted in 
physical horrors. There are demons who gnash with 
iron fangs and brandish gore-fed scorpions; maidens 
are carried off by the Winter King, the Water King, 
the Cloud King, and the Sprite of the Glen; they are 
poisoned or otherwise done to death, and their wraiths 
revisit their guilty lovers in their shrouds at midnight's 
dark hour and imprint clammy kisses upon them with 
livid lips ; gray friars and black canons abound ; requiem 
and death knell sound through the gloom of the 
cloisters; echo roars through high Gothic arches; 
the anchorite mutters in his mossy cell; tapers burn 
dim, torches cast a red glare on vaulted roofs; the 
night wind blows through dark aisles; the owl hoots 
in the turret, and dying groans are heard in the lonely 
house upon the heath, where the black and tattered 
arras molders on the wall. 

The ** Tales of Wonder " included translations by 
Lewis from Goethe's ** Fisher " and *' Erl-King," and 
from German versions of Runic ballads in Herder's 
''Stimmen der Volker." Scott's ''Wild Huntsman," 
from Burger, was here reprinted, and he contributed, 
in addition, " Frederick and Alice," paraphrased from 



The German Tributary. 417 

a romance-fragment in Goethe's opera ** Claudina von 
Villa Bella"; and three striking ballads of his own, 
** The Fire King," a story of the Crusades, and ** Glen- 
finlas" and '* The Eve of St. John," Scottish tales of 
**gramarye." There were two or three old English 
ballads in the collection, such as ''Clerk Colvin" and 
"Tam Lin"; a contribution from George Colman, 
Jr., the dramatist, and one from Scott's eccentric 
friend Leyden; and the volume concluded with Tay- 
lor's *'Lenora." * 

It is comical to read that the Monk gave Scott lec- 
tures in the art of versification and corrected the 
Scotticisms and false rhymes in his translations from 
Burger; and that Scott respectfully deferred to his 
advice. For nothing can be in finer contrast with 
Lewis' penny dreadful, than the martial ring of the 
verse and the manly vigor of the style in Scott's part 
of the book. This is how Lewis writes anapaests, 
e. g.: 

" All shrouded she was in the garb of the tomb, 

Her lips they were livid, her face it was wan ; 
A death the most horrid had rifled her bloom 

And each charm of beauty was faded and gone." 

And this is how Scott writes them: 

* ' He clenched his set teeth and his gauntleted hand, 
He stretched with one buffet that page on the sand. . . 
For down came the Templars like Cedron in flood. 
And dyed their long lances in Saracen blood." 

It is no more possible to take Monk Lewis seriously 
than to take Horace Walpole seriously. They are 

* The " Tales of Terror," and " Tales of Wonder " are reprinted in 
a single volume of " Morley's Universal Library," 1887. 



41 8 c/^ History of English %omanticism. 

both like children telling ghost-stories in the dark and 
trying to make themselves shudder. Lewis was even 
frivolous enough to compose parodies on his own 
ballads. A number of these faceticb — '* The Mud 
King," '* Giles Jollup the Grave and Brown Sally 
Green," etc. — diversify his " Tales of Wonder." 

Scott soon found better work for his hands to do 
than translating German ballads and melodramas; but 
in later years he occasionally went back to these early 
sources of romantic inspiration. Thus his poem 
** The Noble Moringer " was taken from a *' Sammlung 
Deutscher Volkslieder * published at Berlin in 1807 by 
Busching and Von der Hagen. In 1799 he had made 
a rifacimento of a melodrama entitled **Der Heilige 
Vehme" in Veit Weber's '' Sagen der Vorzeit." This 
he found among his papers thirty years after (1829) 
and printed in *'The Keepsake," under the title of 
**The House of Aspen." Its most telling feature is 
the description of the Vehm-Gericht or Secret 
Tribunal, but it has little importance. In his 
" Historic Survey," Taylor said that '* Gotz von Ber- 
lichingen" was *' translated into English in 1799 at 
Edinburgh, by Wm. Scott, Advocate; no doubt the 
same person who, under the poetical but assumed 
name of Walter, has since become the most extensively 
popular of the British writers "! This amazing state- 
ment is explained by a blunder on the title-page of 
Scott's *' Gotz," where the translator's name is given 
as William Scott. But it led to a slightly acrimonious 
correspondence between Sir Walter and the Norwich 
reviewer.* 

The tide of German romance had begun to ebb 
*See " Memoir of Wm. Taylor," Vol, II. pp. 533-38- 



The German Tributary. 419 

before the close of the century. It rose again a 
few years later, and left perhaps more lasting tokens 
this second time; but the ripple-marks of its first 
invasion are still discernible in English poetry and 
prose. Southey was clearly in error when he wrote 
to Taylor, September 5, 1798: *' Coleridge's ballad, 
'The Ancient Mariner' is, I think, the clumsiest 
attempt at German sublimity I ever saw.*" The 
** Mariner" is not in the least German, and when he 
wrote it, Coleridge had not been in Germany and did 
not know the language. He had read ''Die Rauber," 
to be sure, some years before in Tytler's translation. 
He was at Cambridge at the time, and one night in 
winter, on leaving the room of a college friend, care- 
lessly picked up and took away with him a copy of the 
tragedy, the very name of which he had never heard 
before. "A winter midnight, the wind high and 'The 
Robbers ' for the first time. The readers of Schiller 
will conceive what I felt." He recorded, in the 
sonnet "To Schiller" (written December, 1794, or 
January, 1795), ^^^ terrific impression left upon his 
imagination by 

— " The famished father's cry 
From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent," 

and wished that he might behold the bard himself, 
wandering at eve — 

" Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood." 

Coleridge was destined to make the standard transla- 
tion of " Wallenstein"; and there are motives bor- 
rowed from " The Robbers "and " The Ghost-Seer " 

* '• Memoir of Taylor," Vol. I. p. 223. 



^ 



420 fiA History of English "T^pmanticism. 

in his own very rubbishy dramas, ''Zapolya" — of 
which Scott made some use in *' Peveril of the Peak " — 
and ** Osorio " (1797). The latter was rewritten as 
** Remorse," put on at Drury Lane January 23, 1813, 
and ran twenty nights. It had been rejected by 
Sheridan, who expressed a very proper contempt for 
it as an acting play. The Rev. W. L. Bowles and 
Byron, who had read it in manuscript and strangely 
overvalued it, both made interest with the manager 
to have it tried on the stage. ** Remorse" also took 
some hints from Lewis' *'Monk." 

But Coleridge came in time to hold in low esteem, if 
not precisely *'The Robbers" itself, yet that school 
of German melodrama of which it was the grand 
exemplar. In the twenty-third chapter of the " Bio- 
graphiaLiteraria" (18 17) he reviewed with severity the 
Rev. Charles Robert Maturin's tragedy ** Bertram, or 
the Castle of St. Aldobrand," * and incidentally gave 
y \the genesis of that whole theatric species *' which it 
has been the fashion, of late years, at once to abuse 
and to enjoy under the name of the German Drama. 
Of this latter Schiller's * Robbers ' was the earliest 
specimen, the first-fruits of his youth. . . Only as 
such did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate 
the play." Coleridge avows that "The Robbers " and 
its countless imitations were due to the popularity 

* This was one of the latest successes of the kind. It was played* 
at Drury Lane in 1816 for twenty-two nights, bringing the authoij 
£1000, and the printed play reached the seventh edition within the 
year. Among Maturin's other works were " The Fatal Revenge*' 
(1807), " Manuel " (Drury Lane, 1817) " Fredolfo " (Covent Garden, 
1 81 7), and his once famous romance, " Melmoth the Wanderer 
(1820), see ante, p. 249. j 



The German Tributary. 421 

in Germany of the translations of Young's ''Night 
Thoughts," Hervey's '* Meditations," and Richardson's 
''Clarissa Harlowe." "Add the ruined castles, the 
dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and- 
blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern 
author* (themselves the literary brood of the 'Castle 
of Otranto,' the translations of which, with the imita- 
itions and improvements aforesaid, were about that 
time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as 
their originals were making in England), and, as the 
compound of these ingredients duly mixed, you will 
recognize the so-called German Drama," which "is 
English in its origin, English in its materials, and 
English by readoption; and till we can prove that 
Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, 
whether dramatists or romantic writers or writers of 
romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other 
shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than 
were occupied by their originals . . . in their mother 
country, we should submit to carry our own brat on 
our own shoulders." 

Germany, rather than Italy or Spain, became under 
these influences for a time the favored country of 
romance. English tale-writers chose its forests and 
dismantled castles as the scenes of their stories of 
brigandage and assassination. One of the best of a 
bad class of fictions, ^. ^., was Harriet Lee's "The 
German's Tale: Kruitzner," in the series of "Canter- 
bury Tales" written in conjunction with her sister 
Sophia (i 797-1805). Byron read it when he was 
fourteen, was profoundly impressed by it, and made 
it the basis of " Werner," the only drama of his which 
* Mrs. Radcliffe. 



422 z/1 History of English ^^Epmanticism, 

had any stage success. ''Kruitzner" is conceived 
with some power, but monotonously and ponderously 
written. The historic period is the close of the Thirty 
Years' War. It does not depend mainly for its effect 
upon the time-honored "Gothic" machinery, though 
it makes a moderate use of the sliding panel and 
secret passage once again. 

We are come to the gate of the new century, to the 
date of the "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) and within sight 
of the Waverley novels. Looking back over the years 
elapsed since Thomson put forth his "Winter," in 
1726, we ask ourselves what the romantic movement 
in England had done for literature; if indeed that 
deserves to be called a "movement" which had no 
leader, no programme, no organ, no theory of art, and 
very little coherence. True, as we have learned from 
the critical writings of the time, the movement, such 
as it was, was not all unconscious of its own aims and 
directions. The phrase "School of Warton " implies 
a certain solidarity, and there was much interchange 
of views and some personal contact between men who 
were in literary sympathy; some skirmishing, too, 
between opposing camps. Gray, Walpole, and Mason 
constitute a group, encouraging each other's studies 
in their correspondence and occasional meetings. 
Shenstone was interested in Percy's ballad collections, 
and Gray in Warton's " History of English Poetry." 
Akenside read Dyer's "Fleece," and Gray read 
Beattie's "Minstrel" in MS. The Wartons were 
friends of Collins; Collins a friend and neighbor of 
Thomson; and Thomson a frequent visitor at Hagleyi 
and the Leasowes. Chatterton sought to put Rowleyi 
under Walpole's protection, and had his verses ex 



The German Tributary. 423 

amined by Mason and Gray. Still, upon the whole, 
the English romanticists had little community; they 
worked individually and were scattered and isolated 
as to their residence, occupations, and social affilia- 
tions. It does not appear that Gray ever met Collins, 
or the Wartons, or Shenstone or Akenside; nor that 
MacPherson, Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Chatter- 
ton ever saw each other or any of those first mentioned. 
There was none of that united purpose and that eager 
partisanship which distinguished the Parisian cenacle 
whose history has been told by Gautier, or that 
Romantische Schule whose members have been so 
brilliantly sketched by Heine. 

But call it a movement, or simply a drift, a trend; 
what had it done for literature? In the way of stimu- 
lus and preparation, a good deal. It had relaxed the 
classical bandages, widened the range of sympathy, 
roused a curiosity as to novel and diverse forms of art, 
and brought the literary mind into a receptive, expect- 
ant attitude favorable to original creative activity. 
There never was a generation more romantic in temper 
than that which stepped upon the stage at the close 
of the eighteenth century: a generation fed upon 
**Ossian" and Rousseau and *'The Sorrows of 
Werther"and Percy's ** Reliques"and Mrs. Radcliffe's 
romances. Again, in the department of literary and 
antiquarian scholarship much had been accomplished. 
Books like Tyrwhitt's "Chaucer" and Warton's 
" History of English Poetry " had a real importance, 
while the collection and preservation of old English 
poetry, before it was too late, by scholars like Percy, 
Ritson, Ellis, and others was a pious labor. 

But if we inquire what positive additions had been 



424 ^ History of English ^manticism. 

made to the modern literature of England, the reply 
is disappointing. No one will maintain that the 
Rowley poems, **Caractacus," **The Monk," *'The 
Grave of King Arthur," *' The Friar of Orders Gray," 
<'The Castle of Otranto," and ''The Mysteries of 
Udolpho " are things of permanent value: or even 
that **The Bard," ** The Castle of Indolence," and 
the ** Poems of Ossian " take rank with the work done 
in the same spirit by Coleridge, Scott, Keats, Rossetti, 
and William Morris. The two leading British poets 
of the^n du sitcle^ Cowper and Burns, were not among 
the romanticists. It was left for the nineteenth 
century to perform the work of which the eighteenth 
only prophesied. 



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INDEX. 



Abhandlung von dem Wunder- 
baren, 374 

Abuse of Traveling, The, 84, 
89 

Account of the English Dra- 
matic Poets, An, 69 

Account of the Greatest Eng- 
lish Poets, An, 80 

Account of Wm. Canynge's 
Feast, 344, 355 

Adams, Jean, 95 

Addison, Joseph, 35, 37, 40-42, 
45, 46, 49-52. 55-57, 80, 120, 
126, 139, 141, 148, 152, 178, 
179, 181, 210, 218, 219, 223, 
226-28, 283-85, 377, 382, 388, 
408 

Adelmorn, 409 

Adonais, 98, 370 

Adventurer, The, 207 

Adventures of a Star, 353 

^lla, 344, 346, 349, 353-65, 

367 

^ueid, The, 56, 328 

^sop's Fables, 84 

Agamemnon, 75 

Agnes Bernauerin, 399 

Aiken, Lucy, 391, 397 

Akenside, Mark, 52, 75, 84, 85, 
91, 102, 106, 124, 136, 139-42, 
145, 157, 159, 168, 215, 228, 
235, 403, 422, 423 

Albion's Triumph, 85 

Alfieri, Vittorio, 3 

Alley, The, 80 

Allibone's Dictionary of Au- 
thors, 392, 393 

Alonzo the Brave, 415 

Alps, The, 182 

Arabrosio. see the Monk. 



Amherst, Alicia, 119, 123 

Amis et Amile, 64 

Ancient Armor, 189 

Ancient Lays, 326 

Ancient Mariner, The, 18, 262, 

269, 299, 369, 394, 419 
Ancient Songs, 293 
Anecdotes of Painting, 230, 351 
Annus Mirabilis, 137 
Another Original Canto, 84 
Anti-Jacobin, The, 402, 403 
Antiquities of Scotland, 187 
Apology for Smectymnuus, 146 
Apuleius, Lucius, 16, 220 
Arcadia, The Countess of Pem- 
broke's, 239 
Archimage, 84 
Architectura Gothica, 181 
Ardinghello, 400 
Argenis, 241, 242 
Argument against Abolishing 

Christianity, 42 
Ariosto, Lodovico, 25, 100, 219, 

222, 225, 226 
Aristotle, 19, 38, 51, 55, 274, 

276 
Arme Heinrich, Der, 64 
Armstrong, Jno., 106, 124 
Arnold's Chronicle, 274 
Arnold, Matthew, 71, 173, 315, 

389, 408 
Ars Poetica, 47 
Art of Preserving Health, 124 
Art Poetique, L', 47 
Aspects of Poetry, 315 
Atalanta in Calydon, 35 
Athalie, 217 

Atlantic Monthly, The, 11 
Aucassin et Nicolete, 64, 189, 



436 Index, 






Austen, Jane, 263 
Aytoun, Wm. E., 269 

Babes in the Wood, see Chil- 
dren in the Wood. 
Babo, Joseph M,, 398 
Bacon, Francis, 8, 120 
Bagehot, Walter, 17 
Bailey's Dictionary, 360 
Ballads that Illustrate Shaks- 

pere, 284 
Ballantyne's Novelist's Libra- 
ry, 249 
Balzac, Honore de, 249 
Banks of Yarrow, The, 274 
Bannatyne, Geo., 284 
Banville, Theodore F. de, 373 
Baour-Lormian, P. M. F. L., 

337 
Barbauld, Anna L., 391 
Barclay, Jno., 241 
Bard, The, 173, 193, 194, 196, 

424 
Barrett, Wm., 348, 354, 364, 

367 
Bartholin, Thos., igi, 196 
Battle of Hastings, The, 345, 

346, 348, 364, 365 
Battle of Otterburn, The, 278 
Bayly, T. H., 254 
Beattie, Jas., 85, 97, 166, 186, 

242, 245-47, 251, 302-05, 422 
Beaumont and Fletcher, 284 
Beauties of Shakspere, The, 

377 
Beckford, Wm., 403, 405 
Bedingfield, Thos., 85, 97, 215 
Bell, Edward, 340, 342 
Bell of Arragon, The, 172 
Belle Dame sans Merci, La, 

299 
Bell's Fugitive Poetry, 159, 

161 
Bentham, Jas, 180 
Beowulf, 25, 318 
Beresford, Jas., 391 
Berkeley, Geo., 31 
Bernart de Ventadour, 64 
Bertram, 420 



Beth Gelert, 391 
Biographia Literaria, 59, 420 
Black-eyed Susan, 57, 273 
Blacklock, Thos., 85, 333 
Blair, Hugh, 309, 313, 320, 335 
Blair, Robert, 163, 164, 251 
Blake, Wm., 28, 164, 365, 366, 

372 
Blenheim, 104 

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 28, 29, 49 
Bodmer, J. J., 374, 375 
Boiardo, M. M., 25, 100 
Boileau-Despreaux, N., 35, 38, 

47, 49, 65, 212, 214, 226, 227 
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 

Viscount, 41, 135, 382 
Bonny Earl of Murray, The, 

300 
Bonny George Campbell, 275 
Borck, C. von, 377 
Bossuet, J. B., 38 
Boswell, Jas., 94, 105, 139, 150, 

174, 288, 312, 320, 355 
Botanic Garden. The, 99 

Bouhours, Dominique, 49, 227 

Bowles, W. L., 420 

Boy and the Mantle, The, 300 

Boyesen, H. H., 23 

Braes of Yarrow, The, 61, 297 

Brandl, Alois, 391-93 

Bravo of Venice, The, 409 

Brentano, Clemens, 384, 402 

Bristowe Tragedy, The, 346, 
349, 366, 370 

Brockes, B. H., 106 

Brown, " Capability," 124, 130 

Brown, Chas. B., 403 

Brown Robyn's Confession, 
278 

Browne, Sir Thos., 40, 66 

Browne, Wm., 79 

Browning, Robert, 43 

Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 2, 5, 11, 

14 
Bryant, Jacob, 356 
Brydges, Saml. Egerton, 336 
Buchanan, Robt., 272 
Biirger, G. A., 279, 289, 301, 

375, 376, 382, 389-97, 416, 417 



Index. 437 

Burney, Francis, 252 Castles of Athlin and Dun- 
Burning Babe, The, 41 bayne, The, 250, 258, 261 

Burns, Robt., 57, 95, 112, 187, Cath-Loda, 334 

334, 360, 424 Catalogue of Royal and Noble 
Burton, J. H., 178 Authors, 230 

Burton, Robt., 162 Cato, 51. 218, 388 

Byron, Geo. Gordon, Lord, 5, Celtic Literature (Sullivan), 

16, 24, 36, 49, 78, 98, 107, 135, 315, 325 

181, 222, 229, 238, 250, 255, Celtic Literature, on the Study 

262, 328-30, 333, 353, 362, 370, of (Arnold), 315 

402, 405, 406, 420, 421 Cerdick, 329 

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel 
Calderon de la'Barca, Pedro, de, 244 

25 Cesarotti, M., 321, 337 

Caleb Williams, 403 Champion of Virtue, The, 241- 
Calverley, C. S., 270 43 

Cambridge, R. O., 84, 89, 92, Chanson de Roland, The, 27, 

98, 151, 228, 229 64 

Cameron, Ewen, 335 Chappell, Wm., 270 

Cameron, Julia M., 393 Charakteristiken, 382, 391 

Campbell, Thos., 142, 143 Chase, The (Scott), 391 

Campbell, J. F., 314, 322, 323, Chase, The (Somerville), 124 

325, 327 Chateaubriand, F. A. de., 255, 
Canning, Geo., 402, 403 332, 333 

Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), Chatterton (Jones and Her- 

27, 63, 358, 359 man), 373 

Canterbury Tales (Lee), 421 Chatterton (Masson), 362 

Caractacus, 190, 194, 195, 306, Chatterton (Vigny), 372, 373 

424 Chatterton, Thos., 152, 188, 211, 
Caradoc, 195 235, 245, 294, 317, 328, 339- 

Carew, Thos., 66 73, 384, 422, 423 

Carey, Henry, 57 Chaucer, Geoffr'ey, 27, 28, 30, 
Caric-thura, 334 63, 66, 69, 108, 154, 188, 199, 

Carle of Carlisle, The, 293 212, 213, 244, 266, 272, 279, 

Carlyle, Thos., 317, 330, 334, 280, 294, 301, 304, 322, 342, 

397-400 358-60, 363, 371, 382, 383, 423 

Carmen Seculare, 35 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer 
Carter, Jno., 189 Stanhope, Earl of, 40, 50, 137 

Carthon, 311, 333, 335 Chevy Chase, 274, 283-86, 300, 
Castle of Indolence, the, 75, 85, 346, 377 

92-94, 97, 104, 114, 165, 219, Child, F. J., 267, 284 

424 Child Maurice, 292 

Castle of Otranto, The, 188, Child of Elle, The, 289, 290, 301 

211, 215, 223, 229, 231, 236- Child Waters, 281, 295, 298, 301 

43, 247, 249, 253, 255, 340, Childe Harold, 98, 250, 333, 

346, 362, 367, 401, 409, 411, 334, 364 

414, 415, 421, 424 Children in the Wood, The, 
Castle Spectre, The, 401, 413- 273, 283, 285, 288, 302 

15 Choice of Hercules, The, 85 



438 



Index. 



Chrestien de Troyes, 27 
Christabel, 363, 369, 394 
Christian Ballads, 165 
Christ's Kirk o' the Green, 66 
Churchill, Chas., 353 
Cibber, CoUey, 74, 176 
Cid, The, 298 
City of Dreadful Night, The, 

162 
Clarissa Harlowe, 252, 421 
Classic and Romantic, 11 
Classiques et Romantiques, 2 
Classische Walpurgisnacht, 385 
Claudina von Villa Bella, 417 
Clerk, Archibald, 313, 320, 321, 

323, 324 

Clerk Colvin, 279, 417 

Clerkes Tale, The, 280, 281 

Coleridge, S. T., 59, 66, 73, 
108, no, 161, 188, 262, 265, 
269, 299, 328, 363, 366, 368, 
369, 372, 376, 387, 388, 394, 
419-21, 424 

Colin's Mistakes, 84 

Collins, Wm., 25, 75, 104, no, 
112, 114, 118, 129, 136, 142, 
151, 155, 156, 158, 163, 165, 
166, 168-72, 175, 184, 186, 193, 
197, 215, 251, 279, 281, 384, 
403, 422, 423 

Collection of Old Ballads, A., 
284 

Colman, Geo., Jr., 176, 254, 417 

Colvin, Sidney, 16-18 

Companion to the Oxford 
Guide Book, 202 

Complaint of Ninathoma, The, 
328 

Complete Art of Poetry, The, 
69, 72 

Comus, 16, 144, 149, 150, 215 

Conan, 195 

Concubine, The, 85, 95 

Conjectures on Original Com- 
position, 387 

Conquest of Granada, The, 44 

Contemplation, 297 

Cooper's Hill, 39 

Coriolanus, 72, 74 



Corneille, Pierre, 38, 65, 67 
Corsair, The, 334 
Cottle, Joseph, 350, 35S, 368 
Count of Narbonne, The, 240 
Country Walk, The, 142 
Cowley, Abraham, 37, 38, 53, 

66, 79, 120, 228 
Cowper, Wm., 53, 57^ 103, 108, 

no, 112, 115, 424 
Coxe, A. C, 165 , 
CrablDe, Geo., 103 
Crashaw, Richard, 41 
Croft, Herbert, 367, 368 
Croma, 336 
Cromwell, 19, 35 
Croxall, Saml., 84 
Crusade, The, 199 
Cumberland, Richard, 74, 177 
Cumnor Hall, 94 
Cyder, 104, 124 

Dacier, Anne L., 49 
Dalrymple, Sir David, 291, 

306, 336 
Danmark's Gamle Folkeviser, 

266 
Dante Alighieri, 22, 28, 29, 64, 

235 
Darke Ladye, The, 369 
Darthula, 314, 335 
Darwin, Erasmus, 99 
Davenant, Wm,, 67, 74, 137, 226 
David Balfour, 258 
Davies, John, 137 
De Anglorum Gentis Origine, 

192 
De Causis Contemnendse 

Mortis, 191 
De Imitatione Christi, 64 
Dean of Lismore's Book, The, 

314 
Death of Calmar and Orla, The, 

328 
Death of Cuthullen, The, 335 
Death of Hoel, The, 195 
Death of Mr. Pope, 85 
Defence of Poesy, 72, 274 
Defence of the Epilogue to the 

Conquest of Granada, 71 



Index, 



439 



De Foe, Daniel, 40 

Demonology and Witchcraft, 
42, 189 

Demosthenes, 3 

Deirdre, 314 

Denham, Sirjno.,39 

Denis, Michael, 337, 377 

Dennis, Jno., 49, 62, 69, 72, 74, 
285 

Descent of Odin, The, 191, 192, 
220 

Deschanel, 6mile, 2 

Description of the Leasowes, 
133, 139 

Descriptive Poem, A, 185 

Deserted Farm-house, The, 
177 

Deserted Village, The, 91, 207 

Deutscher Art und Kunst, 
Einige Fliegende Blatter, 
von, 380, 381 

Dictionary of French Antiq- 
uities, 221 

Dictionary of National Biog- 
raphy, 359 

Dies Iresi, 64 

Dirge in Cymbeline, The, 75, 
163 

Dissertatio de Bardis, 195 

Dissertation on Fable and 

iPRomance, 242, 245-47 

Dissertation on the Authentic- 
ity of Ossian, 320 

Divine Comedy, The, 27 

Divine Emblems, 164 

Dobson, Austin, 272 

Dobson, Susannah, 221 

Dodd, Wm., 377 

Doddington, Geo. Bubb, 11 1 

Dodsley, Jas,, 349 

Dodsley, Robert, 84, 85, 132, 
133, 135, 139. 209 

Dodsley's Miscellany, 137, 159, 
165 

Don Juan, 5, 49 

Donne, Jno., 28, 37, 66 

Dorset, Chas. Sackville, Earl 
of, 283 

Douglas, 170, 276, 308 



Dream, A, 85 

Dream of Gerontius, The, 41 

Drummer, The, 408 

Dryden, Jno., 27, 41, 44, 49, 50 
-53, 62, 63, 66-68, 70, 71, 74, 
79, 80, 104, 137, 148, 149. 177, 
192, 209, 210, 212, 213, 216, 
265, 283 

Dugdale, Wm., 198 

Dunciad, The, 34, 56 

Diirer, Albrecht, 162 

D'Urfey, Thos., 74 

Dyer, Jno., 75, 102, 103, 106, 
119, 124, 142-45. 168, 215, 
422 

Early English Metrical Ro- 
mances, 301 

Eastlake, Sir Chas., 54, 55, 199, 
231-33 

Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 145 

Edda, The, 64, 190, 196, 220, 

313, 390 
Edinburgh Review, The, 350, 

397 
Education, 85, 89, 90, 126 
Education of Achilles, The, 

85>97 
Edward, 274, 300 
Edwards, Thos., 53, 89, 161 
Effusions of Sensibility, 250 
Eighteenth Century Literature 

(Gosse), 84, 104, 106, 163, 

169, 362 
Elegant Extracts, 211 
Elegies (Shenstone's), 137, 138 
Elegy on the Death of Prince 

Frederick, 85 
Elegy to Thyrza, 135 
Elegy Written in a Churchyard 

in South Wales, 176 
Elegy Written in a Country- 
Churchyard, 103, 137, 157, 

163, 167, 173-77, 204 
Elinoure and Juga, 346, 352, 

354 
Ellis, Geo., 188, 301, 402, 423 
Elstob, Elizabeth, 192 
Emerson, R. W., 66, 388 



440 



Index. 






Emilia Galotti, 380 

Endymion, 370 

English and Scottish Popular 
Ballads, The, 267 

English Bards and Scotch Re- 
viewers, 405 

English Garden, The, 123-27, 

151 

English Literature in the Eight- 
eenth Century (Perry), 7, 163, 
207. 211, 337 

English Metamorphosis, 364, 
365 

English Romantic Movement, 
The (Phelps), 84, 85, 197, 
283, 297, 329 

English Women of Letters, 
249, 262 

Enid, 281 

Enquiry into the Authenticity 
of the Rowley Poems, 359 

Enquiry into the Present State 
of Polite Learning, 208 

Enthusiast, The, 151-53, 160 

Epigoniad, the, 89 

Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, 
56, 157, 163, 218, 220 

Epistle to Augustus, 66, 69, 72, 
115 

Epistle to Mathew, 370 

Epistle to Sacheverel, 80 

Epistle to the Earl of Burling- 
ton, 120, 129 

Epitaphium Damonis, 146 

Epithalamium, 84 

Erl-King, The, 386, 416 

Erskine, Wm., 203, 404 

Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 68, 70 

Essay on Ancient and Modem 
Learning, 69 

Essay on Criticism, 47, 50, 388 

Essay on Gothic Architecture, 
180 

Essay on Gray (Lowell), 209 

Essay on Homer, 387, 389 

Essay on Man, 34, 41, 113, 175 

Essay on Poetry, 47 

Essay on Pope (Lowell), 60, 
169. 173 



Essay on Pope (Warton), 97, 
118, 149, 160, 163, 185, 193, 
206, 212-20, 224 
Essay on Satire, 47, 80 
Essay on Scott, 400 
Essay on Shakspere, 69, 72 
Essay on the Ancient Min- 
strels, 245, 293, 302 
Essay on the Rowley Poems, 

359 
Essay on Truth, 303 
Essays on German Literature, 

23 
Essays on Men and Manners, 

127 
Essays on Poetry and Poets, 

363 
Ethelgar, 328 
Etherege, Geo., 38 
Evans, Evan, 195 
Eve of St. Agnes, The, 98, 257, 

363 
Eve of St. John, The, 417 
Eve of St. Mark, The, 177, 

371 
Evelina, 243, 252 
Evelyn, Jno., 7 
Evergreen, The, 284, 286 
Excellente Ballade of Charity, 

An, 366 |L 

Excursion, The (Mallet), 124 W 
Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 

304 

Fables, (^sop), 84 

Fables (Dryden), 63 

Faerie Queene, The, 16, 37, 66, 
77-101, 154, 215, 225, 365 

Fair Annie, 281, 295 

Fair Circassian, The, 84 

Fair Eleanor, 367 

Fair Janet, 268 

Fair Margaret and Sweet Wil- 
liam, 268, 279, 283, 286, 300 

Farewell Hymn to the Coun- 
try, A, 85 

Fatal Revenge, The, 249, 420 

Fatal Sisters, The, 191 

Faust, 27, 141, 384, 385, 401 



Index. 



441 



Fergusson, Jas., 233 

Feudal Tyrants, 409 

Fichte, J. G., 387 

Fielding, Henry, 26, 40, 76, 

3S3 
Filicaja, Vincenzio, 49 
Fingal, 309, 311, 313, 317, 322, 

324, 335, 336, 338 
! Fire King, The, 417 
First Impressions of England, 

109, 133 
Fischer, Der, 386 
Fisher, The, 416 
Five English Poets, 372 
Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, 

190 
Flaming Heart, The, 41 
Fleece, The, 124, 144, 145, 422 
Fleshly School of Poets, The, 

272 
Fletcher, Giles, 78 
Fletcher, Jno., 25, 51, 79, 117, 

162, 210 
Fletcher, Phineas, 78 
Ford, Jno., 241 
Foreign Review, The, 398 
Forsaken Bride, The, 280 
Fouque, F. de la M., 4, 26, 384 
Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 

306, 307, 309, 311, 323, 326, 

328, 336 
Frankenstein, 401, 403, 406 
Frederick and Alice, 416 
Frederick, Prince of Wales, 84, 

137 
Fredolfo, 420 
Freneau, Philip, 177 
Friar of Orders Grey, The, 298, 

301, 424 
Froissart, Jean, 27, 64, 236 
From Shakspere to Pope, 39, 

60 
Friihling, Der, 106 
Fuller, Thos., 28 
Furnivall, F. J., 292 
Fust von Stromberg, 399 

Gammer Gurton's Needle, 293 
Gandalin, 381 



Gang nach dem Eisenhammer, 

Der, 386 
"Garlands," The, 284 
Garrick, David, 162, 209, 287 
Gaston de Blondville, 250, 259- 

62 
Gates, L, E,, 41, 44 
Gautier, Theophile, 372, 423 
Gay Goshawk, The, 279 
Gay, Jno., 35, 57, 273 
Gebir, 18, 245 
Gedicht eines Skalden, 190, 

377 
Genie du Christianisme, Le, 

332 
Gentle Shepherd, The, 79 
Georgics, The, 11 1 
German's Tale, The, 421 
Geron der Adeliche, 381 
Gerstenberg, H. W. von, 190, 

377, 387 
Geschichte der Deutschen 

Literatur (Hettner) 300, 378, 

387 
Geschichte der Kunst des 

Alterthums, 384 
Ghost-Seer, The, 419 
Gierusalemme Liberata, 214, 

225 
Gilderoy, 283 

Gildon, Chas., 49, 62, 69, 72 
Giles Jollop, 418 
Gil Maurice, 276 
Gilpin, Wm., 185 
Glanvil, Joseph, 390, 408 
Gleim, J. \V. L., 375 
Glenfinlas, 417 
Goddwyn, 344, 363-65 
Godred Crovan, 329 
Godwin, Wm,, 403 
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 3, 

4, II, 31, 141, 252, 255, 275, 

330, 334, 377-81, 384-87, 389* 

397-99, 404, 409, 416, 417 
"Gottinger Hain," The, 378 
Gotz von Berlichingen, 334, 

375, 380, 381, 385, 398-404, 

418 
Golden Ass, The, 16 



442 



Index. 



Golden Treasury, The, 57, 277 
Golo und Genoveva, 399 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 76, 91, 112, 
113, 162, 177, 186, 207-11, 287, 

354 
Gondibert, 137 
Gorthmund, 329 
Gosse, Edmund, 39, 53, 60, 84, 
103, 106, 163, 169, 192, 272, 
362 
Gottfried of Strassburg, 3, 64 
Gottsched, J. C, 374, 383 
Gower, Jno., 266, 272 
Grainger, James, 124, 287 
Granville, Geo,, 47 
Grave, The, 104, 163, 164, 175 
Grave of King Arthur, The, 

199-201, 424 
Graves, Richard, 130-33, 137 
Gray, Thos., 25, 32, 52, 53, 75, 89, 
103, 117-19. 123, 136, 137, 139, 
145, 151, 155, 157-60, 163, 164, 
166-69, 172-85, 190-206, 199, 
201, 204, 206, 209, 211, 215, 
216, 218, 220, 221, 229, 235, 
238, 251, 276, 286, 302, 306-08, 
336, 352, 356, 362, 377, 384, 
387, 422, 423 
Green, Matthew, 136 
Grene Knight, The, 293 
Grim White Woman, The, 407 
Grongar Hill, 104, 119, 142, 143, 

145 
Grose, Francis, 187 
Grounds of Criticism in Trag- 
edy, The, 71 
Grundtvig, Svend, 266 
Guardian, The, 120, 126, 413 
Guest, Lady Charlotte, 189 
Gulliver's Travels, 26 
Gummere, F. B., 276 
Gwin, King of Norway, 367 

Hagley, 108, 109, 122, 127, 131, 

133, 136, 183, 303, 422 
Hales, J. W., 289, 290 
Hallam, Henry, 189 
Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 

379. 387 



Hamilton, Wm., 61, 279 
Hamlet, 387, 401 
Hammond, Jas., 137 
Hardyknut, 286 
Harper's Daughters, The, 409 
Hartmann von Aue, 64, 381 
Harvey, Geo., 336 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 403 
Haystack in the Flood, The, 

299, 363 
Hay ward. A., 234 
Hazlitt, Wm., 161, 254 
Hazlitt, W. C, 205 
Hearne, Thos., 201 
Hedge, F. H., 11, 14, 16 
Heilas, The, 329 
Heilige Vehm, Der, 418 
Heine, Heinrich, 2, 24, 330, 402:> 

423 
Heir of Lynne, The, 290 
Helen of Kirkconnell, 274 
Heliodorus, 244 
Hellenics, 3 
Henriade, The, 50, 214, 216, 

217 
Henry and Emma, 295, 296 
Herbert, Geo., 28, 66, 228 
Herd, David, 299 
Herder, J. G. von, 274, 300, 301, 

337, 376, 378, 380, 384, 387, 

389, 416 
Hermann und Dorothea, 4, 385 
Hermit of Warkworth, The, 

186, 289, 294, 298 
Hermit, The (Beattie), 186, 305 
Hermit, The (Goldsmith), 113, 

186 
Hermit, The (Parnell), 186 
Herrick, Robert, 66 
Hervarer Saga, The, 192 
Hervey, Jas,, 421 
Hettner, H. J. T., 378, 379, 381, 

383. 387 
Hicks, Geo., 192, 193 
Hill, Aaron, 217 
Hind and the Panther, The,. 

41 
Histoire de Dannemarc, 190, 

221, 377 



Index, 443 

Histoire des Troubadours, 221, House of Aspen, The, 418 

222 House of Superstition, The, 

Histoire du Romantisme, 372 85 

Historical Anecdotes of Heral- " How Sleep the Brave," 168 

dry, and Chivalry, 221 Howitt, Wm., 133, 134, 364 

Historic Doubts, 230 Hugo, Victor Marie, 3, 19, 35, 

Historic Survey of German 36, 77, 115, 209 

Poetry, 397, 398, 418 Hume, Robert, 100, 303, 308 

Historie of Peyncteynge in Hunting of the Cheviot, The, 

England, 351 274, 278, 295 ': 

History of Architecture, 233 Huon of Bordeaux, 382 

History of Bristol, 348, 364 Hurd, Richard, 221-26, 245, 246, 

History of Charoba, Queen of 375, 387 

Egypt, 245 Hussar of Magdeburg, The, 

History of England (Hume), 393 

100 Hymn (Thomson), 106 

History of English Literature Hymn to Adversity, 167, 173 

(Taine), 316 Hymn to Divine Love, 85 

History of English Poetry Hymn to May, 85 

(Warton), 36, 205, 206, 211, Hymn to the Supreme Being, 

245, 260, 359, 422, 423 85 

History of English Thought in Hyperion, 35 

the Eighteenth Century, 32, 

41 Idler, The, 207 

History of Gardening, 119, 123 Idyls of the King, The, 146 

History of German Literature II Bellicoso, 153 

(Scherer), 374, 380, 382, 385, II Pacifico, 153, 154 

394 II Penseroso, 104, 115, 142, 147, 

History of Opinion on the 149, 150, 154, 162, 170, 175, 

Writings of Shakspere, 74 334 

History of Santon Barsisa, 413 Iliad, The, 16, 36, 56, 58, 214, 

History of the Gothic Revival, 269, 313, 338, 388, 389 

54, 55, 231 Imaginary Conversations, 18, 

Hobbes, Thos., 226 43 

Holty, L. H, C, 375 Immortality, 85 

Hole, R., 336 Indian Burying Ground, The, 

Home, Jno., 132, 170, 276, 308, 177 

309 Indian Emperor, The, 44 

Homer, 3, 25, 35, 37, 50, 55, 100, Ingelow, Jean, 270 

no, 215, 222-24, 271, 284, 285, Inscription for a Grotto, 136 

310, 313, 318, 330, 335, 376, Institution of the Order of the 

387-89 Garter, 159, 193, 194 

Homes of the Poets, 133, 364 Introduction to the Lusiad, 85 

Horace, 38, 47, 55, 72, 156, 223, Iphigenie auf Tauris, 3, 385, 

285, 411 397 

Houghton, J. MoncktonMilnes, Ireland, Wm. H., 77,294 

Lord, 370 Irene, 51 

Hours in a Library, 235 Isis, 176 

Hours of Idleness, 329 Italian, The, 250, 252, 263 



444 



Index. 



Italienische Reise, 385 
Ivanhoe, 4, 23, 188, 237, 262, 
404 

Jamieson, Robert, 292 

Jane Shore, 286 

[anuary and May, 63 

[emmy Dawson, 273 

[ephson, Robert, 240 

[ew's Daughter, The, 300 

[ock o' Hazeldean, 269, 277, 
363 

Johnnie Armstrong, 274, 278, 
283 

Johnnie Cock, 279, 280 

Johnson, Saml., 37, 40, 50, 51, 
53, 54, 56, 59, 66, 68, 70, 71, 
89, 90, 94, 97, 99, 104, 105, 113, 
131, 132, 136-39, 144, 145, 150. 
151, 172-75, 177, 179, 186, 196- 
98, 207, 224, 243, 274, 285, 
287-89, 295, 302, 303, 312, 313, 
320, 328, 354, 355 

Joinville, Jean Sire de, 27, 64 

Jones, Inigo, 121, 230 

Jonson, Ben, 25, 50, 71, 79, 97, 
210, 285 

Jordan, The, 85 

Journal in the Lakes, 183, 184 

Journey through Holland, 257 

Joyce, R. D., 314 

Julius Caesar, 377 

Junius, Letters of, 353 

Kabale und Liebe, 409 

Kalewala, The, 313 

Kampf mit dem Drachen, Der, 

386 
Kant, Immanuel, 31, 387 
Katharine Janfarie, 277 
Kavanagh, Julia, 249, 262 
Keate, Geo., 182 
Keats, Jno. , 18, 35, 94, 107, 169, 

177, 257, 262, 265, 353, 362, 

363, 370-72, 424 
Keepsake, The, 418 
Kemp Owen, 279 
Kenil worth, 94, 260 
Kenrick, 329 



Kent, Wm., 129, 135, 152 
Kersey's Dictionary, 360, 361 
King Arthur's Death, 278 
King Estmere, 279, 300 
King John and the Abbot, 301 
Kinmont Willie, 278 
Kittridge, G. L., 191, 192 
Kleist, E. C. von, 106 
Klinger, F. M., 379 
Klopstock, F. G., 338, 377 
Knight, Chas., 74 
Knight of the Burning Pestle, 

The, 284 
Knox, v., 211, 212, 228 
Knythinga Saga, The, 196 
Kotzebue, A. F. F. von, 400, 

409, 421 
Kriegslied, 377 
Kruitzner, 421, 422 

La Bruyere, Jean de, 138 

La Calprenede, G. de C. Chev- 
alier de, 6 

Lachin Y Gair, 329 

Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament, 
283 

Lady of the Lake, The, 96, 

299, 399 
La Fontaine, Jean de, 38 
Laing, Malcolm, 318, 320, 329 
L'Allegro, 104, 129, 142, 144, 

147, 149, 150, 154, 158, 170 
Lamartine, A. M. L. de, 176 
Lamb, Chas., 28, 161, 199 
Land of Liberty, 85 
Land of the Muses, The, 85 
Landor, W. S., 3, 18, 34, 42, 

136, 245, 293 
Lang, Andrew, 272 
Langbaine, Gerard, 49, 62, 69, 71 
Langley, Batty, 54, 121, 233 
Lansdowne, Geo. Granville, 

Earl of, 47, 74 
Laocoon, 384, 387 
Lass of Fair Wone, The, 397 
Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 

165, 191, 336, 404 
Lays of Ancient Rome, 269, 

298 



Index, 445 

Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, Lives of the Poets (Johnson), 

269 51, 68, 90, 97, 105, 114, 131, 

Leabhar na Feinne, 314, 323 139, 150, 172, 196, 286 

Lear, 217 Lloyd, Robert, 85, 91, 98, 151, 

Leasowes, The, 127, 130-37, 176 

139, 152, 183, 213, 422 Lockhart, J. G., 298, 391, 398, 

Le Bossu, Rene, 49 402, 403, 406 

Lectures on Translating Longfellow, H. W., 198, 199, 

Homer, 389 269 

Legend of Sir Guy, 278 Longinus, 38 

Legenda Aurea, 3 Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, 

Lee, Harriet and Sophia, 421 244, 247, 248 

Le Lac, 176 Lord Lovel, 268 

Leland, Thos., 244, 247 Lord Randall, 275 

Leland's Collectanea, 260 Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, 

Lenora, 391-97. 4i5. 417 268 

Lenox, Charlotte, 70 Lotus Eaters, The, 18, 92 

Lenz, J. M. R., 379, 387 Love and Madness, 368 

Leonidas, 337 Love's Labour's Lost, 379 

Lessing, G. E., 56, 300, 375, Lowell, J. R., 27, 59, 114, 139, 

376, 379, 380, 384, 387, 397 144, 169, 173, 206, 209, 403 

Letourneur, Pierre, 337 Lowth, Robert, 85, 387 

Letter from Italy, 57, 218 Liirlei, Die, 402 

Letter to Master Canynge, 344 Lukens, Chas., 393 

Letters on Chivalry and Ro- Lusiad, The, 85, 94 

mance, 221-26, 245 Lycidas, 37, 115, 145, 149, 150, 

Letters to Shenstone, Lady 154, 192 

Luxborough's, 135, 229 Lydgate, Jno,, 206, 266, 344, 359 

Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, Lyrical Ballads, 58, 109, 112, 

18-22 160, 183, 218, 288, 299, 316, 

Lewis, M. G., 249, 252, 262, 376, 422 

394» 396, 400, 401, 404-18, 420 Lytel Geste of Robyn Hode, 

Leyden, Jno., 417 The, 274 

Library of Romance, 381 Lyttelton, Geo. Lord, 90, 91, 

Life of Lyttelton (Phillimore), 95, 108, iii, 121, 127, 131, 132, 

74, 108 135-37, 303 
Lines on Observing a Blossom, 

368 Mabinogion, The, 189 

Lines Written at Tintern Ab- Macaulay, T. B., 69, 238, 269, 

bey, 140 272, 298 

Literary Movement in France, Macbeth, 223 

The, 35, 44, 61 McClintock, W. D., 102 

Literatura Runica, 191 Mackenzie, Henry, 252, 390 

Little Musgrave and Lady Mackenzie, Jno., 321 

Barnard, 283 McLauchlan, Thos., 314 

Lives of the English Poets Macmillan's Magazine, 326 

(Winstanley), 69 McNeil, Archibald, 326 

Lives of the Novelists (Scott), MacPherson, Jas., 24, 195, 294, 

262 302, 306-38, 377, 423 



446 



Index. 



Madden, Sir Frederick, 292 
Malherbe, Frangois de, 38 
Mallet, David, 75, 105, 106, 124, 

235, 283, 286 
Mallet, P. H., 190, 191, 196, 

221, 374, 377 
Malone, Edmond, 32, 356, 362 
Malory, Sir Thos., 27 
Manfred, 334 

Man of Feeling, The, 252, 390 
Mansus, 146 
Manuel, 420 
Map, Walter, 27 
Marble Faun, The, 23 
Mariner's Wife, The, 95 
Marlowe, Christopher, 66 
Marmion, 203, 234, 258, 336, 399, 

404, 411 
Marriage of Frederick, 84 
Marriage of Gawaine, The, 278 
Mary Hamilton, 280 
Mason, Wm., 85, 91, 123-27, 

129, 151, 153-55, 160, 165, 167, 

176, 180, 183, 190, 194-96, 211, 

213, 215, 221, 251, 276, 306, 

307, 337. 352, 422, 423 
Masson, David, 148, 362 
Mather, Cotton, 408 
Mathias, Thos. J., 393 
Maturin, Chas. Robert, 249, 

420 
Meditations (Harvey) 421 
Melmoth the Wanderer, 249, 

420 
Memoires sur I'ancienne Che- 

valerie, 221, 222 
Memoirs of a Sad Dog, 353 
Mendez, Moses, 85, 91, 159 
Menschenhass und Reue, 400 
Merchant of Venice, The, 372 
Meyrick, Sir Saml. R., 189 
Michael, 4 

Mickle, Wm. J., 85, 94-96 
Middle Ages, The (Hallam) 189 
Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 

76, 235, 382 
Miller and the King's Daughter, 

The, 283 
Miller, Johann M., 375, 400 



Miller, Hugh, 108, 109, 130, 133, 
136 

Milles, Jeremiah, 356, 361 

Milnes, R. Monckton, 370 

Milton, Jno,, 16, 34, 37, 40, 52, 
53, 55,56,63,66,69,78, 79,94. 
104, no. III, 115, 129, 140, 
142, 144, 146-62, 170, 173, 193, 
199, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 
219, 222, 225, 244, 265, 283, 
297. 318, 371, 374, 391 

Miltonic Imitations in Dodsley, 
List of, 159-61 

Minister, The, 409 

Minnesingers, The, 375 

Minot, Lawrence, 293 

Minstrel, The, 85, 97, 245, 302- 
05, 422. 

Minstrelsy, Ancient and Mod- 
ern, 270 

Minstrelsy of the Scottish Bor- 
der, 262, 267, 277, 299, 404. 

Mirror, The, 85 

Miscellany Poems (Dryden), 
192, 283 

Miss Kitty, 393 

Modern Painters, 26, 34 

Moser, Justus, 375, 380 

Moliere, J. B. P., 38 

Monasticon, Anglicanum, 198 

Monk, The, 249, 262, 263, 401, 
404, 407-13. 420, 424 

Monody on the Death of Chat- 
terton, 368 

Monody Written near Strat- 
ford-upon-Avon, 201 

Monologue, A, 176 

Montagu, Elizabeth R., 303, 

337 
Monthly Magazine, The, 391, 

392 
Monthly Review, The, 397 
Moral Essays, 220 
More, Hannah, 151 
Morning, 85 

Morris, Wm., 191, 203, 424 
Morte Artus, 64, 390 
Motherwell, Wm., 270, 299 
Mud King, The, 418 



Index. 



447 



Miiller, Friedrich, 399 
Miiller, Johannes, 376 
Mulgrave, Jno. Sheffield, Earl 

of, 47, 63 
Murdoch, Patrick, 105 
Musaeus, 85, 153-55 
Musen Almanach, 393 
Musset, Alfred de, iS-22 
Myller, C. H., 375 
Mysterious Mother, The, 237, 

238, 241, 251, 253, 401, 409 
Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 

250, 252-55, 262, 263, 401, 424 

Nares' and Halliwell's Glos- 
sary, 189 
Nathan der Weise, 376, 397 
Nativity, The, 85 
Nature, 388 

Nature of Poetry, The, 162 
New Canto of Spenser's Fairy 

Queen, A, 84, 85 
Newman, F. W., 389 
Newman, J. H., 41 
New Memoirs of Milton, 149 
New Principles of Gardening, 

121 
Nibelungen Lied, The, 25, 64, 

313. 375, 376 
Nichols' Anecdotes, 192 
Night Piece on Death, 61, 177 
Night Thoughts, 104, 163, 175, 

387,421 
Noble Moringer, The, 418 
Nocturnal Reverie, 57, 61 
Noel, Roden, 363 
Nonne Prestes Tale, The, 28 
Northanger Abbey, 263, 264 
Northern Antiquities, 190 
Northumberland Betrayed by 

Douglas, 278 
Nosce Teipsum, 137 
Not-brown Maid, The, 274, 295, 

296, 300, 302 
Notes and Illustrations to 

Ossian, 318 
Notes on the Authenticity of 

Ossian's Poems, 326 
Notre Dame de Paris, 3 



Nouvelle Heloise, La, 31 
Novalis, 384 

Oberon, 382 

Observations on English 
Meter, 206 

Observations on Modern Gar- 
dening (Whately) , 123 

Observations on The Faery 
Queene, 99-101, 204, 213, 223 

Observations on The Scenery 
of Great Britain, 185 

Observations upon the Poems 
of Thomas Rowley, 356 

Odes, (Akenside's), 142 

Odes, (Collins'), 142, 155, 156 

Odes, (Gray's), 362 

Odes, (J. Warton's), 142, 155, 
156 

Odes, For the New Year, 1*99. 
On a Distant Prospect of 
Eton College, 167, 173, 216. 
On His Majesty's Birthday, 
199. On the Approach of 
Summer, 158. On the 
Death of Thomson, 163, 165, 
194, On the First of April, 
158. On the Installation of 
the Duke of Grafton, 159. 
On the Morning of Christ's 
Nativity, 147, 149, 150, 156. 
On the Passions, 166, 169, 

175. On the Spring, 167, 173. 
On the Superstitions of the 
Scottish Highlands, 25, 114, 
170-72. Sent to Mr. Upton, 
201. To a Grecian Urn, 18. 
To a Nightingale (Keats) 18. 
To an ^olus Harp, 165. To 
Curio, 85. To Evening (Col- 
lins), 156, 165, 168. To 
Evening (Warton), 165. To 
Fear, 156. To Freedom, 363. 
To Liberty, 194. To Obliv- 
ion, 176. To Obscurity, 

176. To Peace, 305. To 
Pyrrha, 156. To Simplicity, 
156. To Solitude, 165. To 
the "Hon. Charles Townsend, 



448 



Index, 



84. To the Marquis of Tavis- 
tock, 84. To the Nightin- 
gale (Warton), 165. To the 
Queen, 84. Written at Vale 
Royal Abbey, 204 

Odyssey, The, 16, 269 

CEdipus Rex, 3, 19, 241 

Of Heroic Virtue, 192, 197 

Of Poetry, 192 

Old English Ballads, 276 

Old English Baron, The, 241- 
43, 249 

Oldmixon, Jno., 62 

Old Plays (Dodsley) 209 

Olive, The, 84 

On King Arthur's Round Table, 
201 

On Modern Gardening (Wal- 
pole), 123, 130 

On Myself, 79 

On Our Lady's Church, 344 

On the Prevailing Taste for 
the Old English Poets, 211 

On the River Duddon, 162 

On Witches (Glanvil), 408 

Opie, Amelia, 252 

Orcades, 191 

Origin of Romantic Fiction, 
The, 205 

Original Canto of Spenser, An, 
84 

Ormond, 403 

Osorio, 420 

Ossian (MacPherson's), 25, 117, 
178, 195, 235, 245, 256, 302, 
306-38, 355, 356, 377, 378, 423, 
424 

Ossian, Poems of, in the Orig- 
inal Gaelic (Clerk), 313 

Ossian, Poems of, in the Orig- 
inal Gaelic (In Gillie's Collec- 
tion), 326 

Ossian, Poems of, in the Orig- 
inal Gaelic (Highland So- 
ciety's Text), 321, 324, 326 

Ossian, Poems of, in the Orig- 
inal Gaelic (In Stewart's 
Collection), 326 

Othello, 372 



Otto von Wittelsbach, 398 
Otway, Thos., 74, 210 
Ovid, 25 
Oxford Sausage, The, 199 

Pain and Patience, 84 
Palamon and Arcite, 28, 215 
Palgrave, F. T., 57, 277 
Pamela, 252 
Paradise Lost, 50, 52, 55-57, 

104, no, 129, 145, 147, 148, 

151, 217, 375 
Paradise Regained, 147, 148 
Parliament of Sprites, The, 

344, 365 
Parnell, Thos., 58, 61, 177, 186, 

210 
Parzival, 64 

Pastoral Ballad, A., 138 
Pastoral in the Manner of 

Spenser, A., 85 
Pastoral Ode, A., 133 
Pastorals (Philips'), 80 
Pastorals (Pope's), 57, 112, 193, 

215, 216 
Pater, Walter, 7, 8, 16 
Paul and Virginia, 22, 112 
Pearch's Collection, 159, 182, 

185 
Peck, F., 149 

Pellissier, George, 35, 44, 61, 65 
Pepys, Saml., 283, 291 
Percy Folio MS., The, 288, 290- 

93 
Percy, Thos., 186, 196, 212, 

235, 246, 272, 284, 306, 319, 

326, 383, 387, 422. See also 

Reliques. 
Perigrine Pickle, 139 
Perle, The, 189 
Perry, T. S., 7, 163, 176, 211, 

212, 251, 337 
Persiles and Sigismonda, 244 
Peter Bell, 299 
Petrarca, Francesco, 29 
Peveril of the Peak, 420 
Pfarrers Tochter, Des, 396 
Phelps, W. L., 84, 85, 191, 197, 

283, 297, 329 



Index. 



449 



Philander, 85 

Philantheus, 85 

Philips, Ambrose, 80, 102, 284 

Philips, Edward, 67, So 

Philips, Jno., 104, 124 

Phillimore's Life of Lyttelton, 

74, 108 
Phoenix, The, 241 
Pieces of Ancient Popular 

Poetry, 293 
Pilgrim's Progress, The, 5 
Pindar, 35, 54, 89 
Pitt, Christopher, 85 
Pitt, Wm., go, 132, 133 
Pizarro, 400 
Plato, 42, 47 
Pleasures of Hope, The, 142, 

143 
Pleasures of Imagination, The, 

124, 139-42, 157 
Pleasures of Melancholy, The, 

142, 156-58, 160, 161, 194 
Pleasures of Memory, The, 142 
Poe, Edgar A., 202, 356, 390, 

403 
Poem in Praise of Blank Verse, 

217 
Poems after the Minnesingers, 

375 

Poems after Walther von der 
Vogelweide, 375 

Pope, Alexander, 33, 36, 39, 41, 
47, 50-54. 56-59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 
69, 72, 75, 77-79, 92, 93, 99, 
102, 105, 108, 111-13, 115, 120, 
121, 126, 129, 136, 149, 150, 
354, 157, 159, 162, 163, 193, 
210, 212-20, 228, 235, 265, 382, 
383, 388 

Popular Ballads and Songs 
(Jamieson), 292 

Popular Tales of the West 
Highlands, 322, 323, 325 

Porter, Jane, 252, 371 

Portuguese Letters, The, 22 

Prselectiones de Sacra Poesi 
Hebraeorum, 387 

Preface to Johnson's Shaks- 
pere, 70 



Preface to Pope's Shakspere, 

72 
Prelude, The, 304 
Price, Richard, 205 
Prior, Matthew, 35, 57, 63, 84, 

159, 291, 295, 296, 382 
Prioresse Tale, The, 279, 342 
Progress of Envy, The, 85, 91 
Progress of Poesy, The, 173 
Progress of Romance, The, 

243-45 
Prologue at the Opening of 

Drury Lane, 59, 70 
Proud Maisie, 277 
Psalm XLII., 84 
Psyche, 85 

Pugin, A. N. W., 234 
Pure, Ornate and Grotesque 

Art, 17 
Pursuits of Literature, 393 
Pye, H. J., 392 

Quarles, Francis, 164 

Racine, J. B., 38, 44, 65, 379 
Radcliffe, Anne, 232, 237, 249- 

64, 402, 408, 409, 411, 421, 423 
Rambler, The, 97, 2S7, 288, 353 
Ramsay, Allan, 61, 79, 284, 2S6, 

297, 300 
Rape of the Lock, The, 36, 220 
Rapin, Rene, 49 
Rasselas, 186 

Rauber, Die. See Robbers. 
Reeve, Clara, 241-45, 247, 249- 

64, 423 

Regnier, Mathurin, 38 

Reliques of Ancient English 
Poetry, 139, 188, 190, 206, 209, 
211, 223, 265, 274, 278, 287-302, 
317, 346, 362, 369, 376, 423 

Remorse, 420 

Report of the Committee of the 
Highland Society on Ossian, 

319 
Resolution and Independence, 

^339 

Retirement, 305 
Revenge, The, 353 



450 



Index. 



Revival of Ballad Poetry in 

the Eighteenth Century, 290 
Revolt of Islam, The, 5 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 202, 303 
Richardson, Saml., 31, 32, 40, 

76, 252, 421 
Riddles Wisely Expounded, 

270 
Ridley, G., 85 

Rime of Sir Thopas, The, 28 
Rising in the North, The, 278 
Ritson, Joseph, 188, 205, 246, 

287, 290, 293, 294, 301, 423 
Ritter Toggenburg, 386 
Robbers, The, 385, 391, 402, 417, 

418, 420 
Robin Hood and the Monk, 273, 

278, 283 
Robin Hood and the Old Man, 

292 
Robin Hood and the Potter, 

273 
Robin Hood Ballads, The, 

281-83, 301 
Robin Hood (Ritson's), 292 
Robinson Crusoe, 5, 26 
Rogers, Saml., 142, 181 
Rokeby, 277 
RoUa, 400, 409 
Rolls of St. Bartholomew's 

Priory, The, 358 
Roman de la Rose, The, 37, 64 
Romance, 390 
Romance of the Forest, The, 

250, 253, 255, 256 
Romancero, The, 64 
Romantic and Classical in 

English Literature, The, 102 
Romantic Tales, 409 
Romanticism (Pater), 7 
Roman tische Schule, Die, 2, 423 
Romaunt of the Rose, The, 27 
Romaunte of the Cnyghte, The, 

348 
Romeo and Juliet, 377 
Ronsard, Pierre de, 22 
Roscommon, W. Dillon, Earl 

of, 47 
Ross, Thos., 321, 322 



Rossetti, D. G., 4, 270, 272. 367, 

372, 424 
Roundabout Papers, 252 
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 31, 

112, 252, 330, 381, 423 
Rovers, The, 402 
Rowe, Nicholas, 210, 219, 286 
Rowley Poems, The, 211, 339- 

67, 424 
Rudiments of Anglo-Saxon 

Grammar. 192 
Rugantino, 409 
Ruins of Netley Abbey, The, 

182 
Ruins of Rome, The, 144, 145 
Ruskin, Jno., 26, 34, 102, 255 
Rymer, Thos,, 49, 62, 70 
Reyse of Peyncteynge yn Eng- 

lande. The, 349 

Sachs, Hans, 381 
Sadduceismus Triumphatus, 

408 
Sagen der Vorzeit, 418 
Sangers Fluch, Der, 275 
Saint Alban's Abbey, 262 
Sainte-Beuve, C. A, 56 
Sainte Palaye, J. B. de la C, 

221, 222, 374 
St. Irvine the E.osicrucian, 

403 
Saint Lambert, C, P., 106 
St. Leon, 403 

St. Pierre, J. H. B. de, 112 
Saintsbury, Geo., iii, 131 
Saisons, Les, 106 
Sally in our Alley, 57 
Salvator Rosa, 255 
Sammlung Deutscher Volks- 

lieder, 418 
Samson Agonistes, 148, 184 
" Saturdav Papers," Addison's, 

148 
Schelling, F. W. J. von, 387 
Scherer, Wilhelm, 300, 374, 

376, 380, 382, 394 
Schiller, J. C. F. von, 11, 76, 

379, 384-87, 391, 401, 409, 419, 
420 



Index. 



451 



Schlegel, A. W. von, 14, 73, 

301, 377, 384, 392 
Schmidt, Erich, 382, 392 
Schone Helena, Die, 385 
Scholar Gypsy, The, 408 
Schoolmistress, The, 84, 91, 92, 

97, 104, 130, 136, 138, 362 
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 119 
Scott, Sir Walter, 3, 16, 24, 26, 
27, 42, 94, 96, 139, 187-89, 191, 
200, 203, 223, 232, 234, 238, 
248, 249, 258, 260, 262, 267, 
269, 277, 298-301, 333, 334, 
344. 350, 358, 359, 376, 389- 
96, 398-400, 402, 404-06, 410, 
411, 416-18, 420, 424 
Scottish Songs (Ritson's), 293 
Scribleriad, The, 228, 229 
Scudery, Madeleine de, 6 
Sean Dana, 326 
Seasons, The (Mendez), 85 
Seasons, The (Thomson), 52, 
75. 79, 103, 105-20, 124, 170, 
152, 305, 374 
Selden, Edward, 283 
Selections from Gray (Phelps), 

191 
Selections from Newman 

(Gates), 41, 44 
Seven Champions of Christen- 
dom, The, 37 
Shadwell, Thos., 74 
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley 
Cooper, Earl of, 41, 62, 226, 
382 
Shairp, J. C. 315 
Shakspere Alterations, List of, 

74 
Shakspere Editions, List of, 

74 
Shakspere Illustrated, 70 
Shakspere, Wm., 18, 25, 40, 50, 
51, 63, 68-78,89, III, 117, 140, 
170, 171, 198, 208-10, 213, 216- 
19, 225, 237, 298, 362, 375, 
377-80, 383, 391 
Shelley, Mary, 403, 406 
Shelley, P. B. , 5, 43, 107, 241, 
362, 370, 372, 403, 406 



Shenstone, Wm., 75, 84, 91, 97, 
98, 102, 103, 110, 127, 130-39, 
151, 152, 159, 162, 168, 184, 
186, 215, 229, 273, 287, 422, 

423 
Shepherd's Calendar, The, 154 
Sheridan, R. B., 76, 162, 400, 

413, 420 
Sheridan, Thos., 74 
Sheringham, Robert, 192 
Sicilian Romance, The, 250, 

253 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 25, 71, 72, 

239, 274 
Sieg^^art, 400 
Sigurd the Volsung, 191 
Sim, Jno., 94 
Sinclair, Archibald, 325 
Sinclair, Sir Jno., 321 
Sir Cauline, 289, 290, 298 
Sir Charles Grandison, 388 
Sir Hugh, 279 
Sir Lancelot du Lake, 278 
Sir Patrick Spens, 300 
Sister Helen, 363 
Sisters, The, 270 
Six Bards of Ossian Versified, 

The, 336 
Skeat, W. W., 340, 355, 358-61. 

364 
Skene, W. P., 314, 323 
Sketches of Eminent States- 
men, 234 
Smart, Christopher, 85 
Smith, Adam, 105 
Smollett, Tobias, 76, 139 
Solitary Reaper, The, 115 
Somerville, Wm., 106, 124, 135 
Song of Harold the Valiant, 

196 
Song of Ragner Lodbrog, 197 
Song to ^lla, 355 
Songs of Selma, The, 331 
Sonnet to Chatterton, 370 
Sonnet to Mr. Gray, 201 
Sonnet to Schiller, 419 
Sonnet to the River Lodon, 

161 
Sophocles, 3, 19, 241, 379 



452 



Index. 



Sophonisba, 75 

Sorrows of Werther, The, 31, 
330-32, 399, 423 

Sotheby, Wm., 382 

Soutliey, Robert, 206, 299, 350, 
355, 358, 368, 398, 419 

Southwell, Robert, 41 

Spaniards in Peru, The, 400, 
409 

Specimens of Ancient Sculp- 
ture, 189 

Specimens of Early English 
Poets, 301 

Specimens of the Welsh Bards, 

195 
Spectator, The, 35, 37, 42, 49, 
51, 55, 62, 120, 126, 139, 141, 
148, 178, 227, 284. 353, 377 
Speght's Chaucer, 360 
Spence, Joseph, 132 
Spencer, W. R., 392, 394 
Spenser, Edmund, 16, 25, 33, 
37, 63, 68,69, 77-101, 129, 151, 
154, 157, 159, 163, 170, 198, 
199, 212, 213, 216, 219, 222, 
224-26, 235, 244, 265, 279, 304, 

359. 371 
Spleen, The, 104, 136 
Splendid Shilling, The, 104 
Squire of Dames, The, 85, 91 
Stanley, J. T.,392 
State of German Literature, 

The, 401 
Stedman, E.G., 162 
Steevens, Geo., 32 
Stello, 372 
Stephen, Leslie, 32-34, 40, 102, 

234, 237, 327 
Sterne, Lawrence, 31, 32, 252 
Stevenson, R. L.,258 
Stillingfleet, Benjamin, 53, 161 
Stimmen der Volker, 300, 337, 

416 
Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold, 

Count, 376, 377 
Storie of William Canynge, 

The, 355 
Stranger, The, 400 
Stratton Water, 299 



Strawberry Hill, 173, 179, 229, 

230, 232, 234, 236, 340 
Sturm von Borberg, 399 
Suckling, Sir Jno., 57 
Sugar Cane, The, 124 
Sullivan, Wm. R., 314, 325 
Sweet William's Ghost, 279, 

280, 295, 300, 394 
Swift, Jonathan, 40, 42, 162, 

382 
Swinburne, A. C, 35, 168 
Syr Gawaine, 293 
Syr Martyn, 95, 96 
System of Runic Mythology, 

191 

Taine, H. A., 302. 316 
Tale of a Tub, 42 
Tales of Terror, 409, 417 
Tales of Wonder, 404, 409, 416 

-18 
Talisman, The, 188 
Tam Lin, 268, 279, 295, 417 
Tam o'Shanter, 187, 360 
Tannhauser, 268 
Tasso, Torquato, 25, 49, 50, 

170, 219, 222-26 
Tate, Nahum, 74 
Tatler, The, 62 
Taylor, Jeremy, 40 
Taylor, Wm., 376, 391-98, 417- 

18 
Tea Table Miscellany, The, 

284, 297 
Temora, 309, 313, 314, 316, 321, 

323, 338 
Tempest, The, 70, 76, 171, 215 
Temple, Sir Wm., 69, 120, 192, 

197 
Tennyson, Alfred, 18, 27, 35, 

92, 93, 146, 200, 270, 281 
Thackeray, W. M., 56, 80, 252, 

254 
Thaddeus of Warsaw, 243, 252 
Thales, 85 

Theagenes and Chariclea, 244 
Theatrum Poetarum, 67, 81 
Theocritus, 36 
Thesaurus (Hicks'), 192, 193 



Index. 



453 



Thomas a Kempis, 64 

Thomas Rymer, 268 

Thompson, Wm., 84 

Thomson, Jas., 52, 74, 75, 79, 
84, 85, 92-95» 97, 98»/ 102-19, 
124, 133-36, 142, 151, 157, 159, 
1^8, 184, 198, 215, 235, 25f, 
302, 303, 305, 374, 3S4, 422 

Thomson, Jas, (2d), 162 

Thoreau, H. D. , 107 

Tieck, Ludwig, 22, 377, 384 

To Country Gentlemen of Eng- 
land, 85 

Todtentanz, Der, 386 

To Helen, 202 

To Melancholy, 251 

Tom Jones, 186, 263 

Tom Thumb, 285 

" Too Late I Stayed," 392 

Torfseus Thormodus, 191 

To the Nightingale (Lady 
Winchelsea), 61 

To the Nightingale (Mrs. Rad- 
cliffe), 251 

To the Nightingale. See Odes. 

To the River Otter, 161 

Tournament, The, 348, 365 

Town and Country Magazine, 
The, 346, 352 

Tragedies of the Last Age 
Considered, The, 70 

Tressan, L. E. de L., Comte 
de, 381 

Triumph of Isis, The, 199 

Triumph of Melancholy, The, 
305 

Triumphs of Owen, The, 195 

Tristan und Isolde, 3, 64 

Trivia, 35 

Troilus and Cresseide, 28 

True Principles of Gothic 
Architecture, 234 

Turk and Gawin, The, 293 

Twa Corbies, The, 275 

Two Sisters, The, 270, 279 

Tyrwhitt, Thos., 63, 188, 211, 
213, 246, 301, 355-57, 359, 
423 

Tytler, Sir A. F., 391, 419 



Ueber naive und sentimen- 
talische Dichtung, 11, 387 

Ueber Ossian und die Lieder 
alter Volker, 338 

Uhland, Ludwig, 384 

Ulysses, 18, 35 

Unconnected Thoughts on 
Gardening, 127, 132 

Universal Prayer, The, 41 

Unnatural Flights in Poetry, 

47 
Upton, John, 85 
Uz, J. P., 106 

Vanity of Dogmatizing, The, 

40S 
Vathek, 403, 405 
Vergil, 25, 37, 49, 50, 55, no, 

223, 285, 335 
Verses to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 

202 
Verses Written in 1748, 133 
Vicar of Wakefield, The, 

209 
Vigny, Alfred Victor, Comte 

de, 372, 373 
Villehardouin, Geoffroy de, 27, 

64 
Villon, Frangois, 64, 216 
Vindication (Tyrwhitt's) 359 
Virtuoso, The, 84, 91, 141, 

228 
Vision, The (Burns), 334 
Vision, The (Croxall), 84 
Vision of Patience, The, 84 
Vision of Solomon, The, 84 
Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 214, 216, 

237, 379, 381, 382 
Von Arnim, Achim (L. J.), 

384 
Voragine, Jacobus de, 3 
Vorlesungen iiber dramatische 

Kunst und Literatur, 14 
Voss, J. H., 375 

Wackenroder, W. H., 384 
Wagner, H. L., 379 
Waking of Angantyr, The, 192 
Wallenstein, 385, 419 



454 Index. 

Waller, Edmund, 38, 39, 52, 53, Whittington and his Cat, 

80, 216 273 

Walpole, Horace, 32, 89, 120, Wieland, 403 

122, 129, 130, 135, 145, 159, Wieland, C. M., 106, 377, 378, 

166, 173, 178, 179, 181, 229-43, 381, 397 

249-55, 258, 286, 306, 336, 337, Wife of Usher's Well, The, 

349-52, 354, 383, 401, 408, 417, 269, 279 

422 Wilde Jager, Der, 391 
Walsh, Wm., 50, 53 Wild Huntsman, The, 404, 
Walther von der Vogelweide, 416 

64 Wilkie, Wm., 85 

" Waly, Waly," 274, 300 Wilhelm Meister, 384, 3S7 

Wanton Wife of Bath, The, Wilhelm Tell, 385 

301 William and Helen, 391, 398, 
Warburton, Wm., 237 404 

Wardlaw, Lady, 286 Willie Drowned in Yarrow, 
Ward's English Poets, 53, in, 170 

131, 169, 364 Willie's Lady, 279 

Warton, Joseph, 32, 75, 118, Wilson's Life of Chatterton, 

142, 149, 151-53, 155, 156, 160, 368 

163, 168, 171, 185, 193, 197-99, Winchelsea, Anne Finch, 

206, 207, 212-20, 223, 226, 262, Countess of, 57, 61 

302, 355, 375, 383, 387, 422, Winckelmann, J. j., 384, 385 

423 Windsor Forest, 57, 58, 215, 
Warton, Thos., Jr., 32, 36, 53, 220 

75, 84, 85, 99-101, 150, 151, Winstanley, J\^iniam, 62, 69 

156-58, 161, 163, 168, 171, Winter, 103-106, 142, 422 

194, 197-207, 211, 213, 221, Wither, Geo., 57 

224, 226,-245, 251, 260, 291, Wodrow, Jno., 334, 335 

293, 294, 302, 356, 359, 375, Wolfram von Eschenbach, 
387, 403, 422, 423 64 

Warton, Thos,, Sr., 85, 197 Wolf red von Dromberg, 398 

WaverleyNovels, The, 188, 258, Wonders of the Invisible 

262, 400, 422 World, 408 

Way, G. L., 301 Wood, Anthony, 291 

Weber's Metrical Romances, Wood, Robert, 387-89 

188 Worde, Wynkyn de, 274 

Weber, Veit, 400, 418 Wordsworth, Wm., 4, 5, 43, 58, 
Webster, Jno. , 66 103, 107, 109, 112. 115, 135, 

Werner, 421 143-45, 160, 162, 183, 184, 218, 

Wesley, Jno., 31 220, 288-90, 298, 299, 304, 316, 

West, Gilbert, 84, 85, 89-91, 98, 326, 328, 339, 344 

126, 133, 151, 160, 193, 194 Worm, Ole, 191, 193 

Whately, Thos., 122 Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 
Whistle, The, 334 269 

White Doe of Rylstone, The, Wren, Sir Christopher, 121, 

184 230 

Whitefield, Geo., 31 Written at an Inn at Henley, 
Whitehead, Wm., 84, 197 138 



Written at Stonhenge, 201 
Written in Dugdale's Monasti- 
con, 198 



Index. 

Young Hunting, 279 
Young Lochinvar, 277 
Young Waters, 300 



455 



Yarrow Revisited, 344 Zapolj-a, 420 

Yarrow Un visited, 298 ^ ^^ Zastrozzi, 403 

Young, Edward, 56, 149, idf, Zauberlehrling, Der, 3S6 

213, 337» 388, 421 Zauberring, Der, 4 



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